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The agreement amounts to the surrender of Armenia; Azerbaijan, like Turkey, can feel like a winner. At the national level, all signs point to a storm in Armenia; Russia could benefit from this.
In the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, the population is happy to have won the war in Nagorni Karabakh.
The war for Nagorni Karabakh came to a dramatic halt on Tuesday night. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a ten-point plan that saw all fighting cease until the early hours of the morning. The guarantee of this will be provided by the Russian “peacekeeping troops” who were transferred from Russia to Armenia that night. Their mandate is initially limited to five years.
Pashinyan was the first to announce the news: the situation had not allowed anything else. The “President” of the unknown Nagorni Karabakh Republic, Araik Arutjunjan, later made a similar statement. It is the very bitter realization of the Armenian side that they have lost this war and that they have to make very broad concessions that will strengthen Azerbaijan, Russia and Turkey. While joyful dances were being held in the Azerbaijani capital Baku at night, angry Armenians stormed government buildings in the capital Yerevan, ransacked Pashinyan’s residence, and took Parliamentary Speaker Ararat Mirsoyan to the hospital. President Armen Sarkisjan announced that he had learned of the agreement from the media.
Disappointed by the lost war in Nagorni Karabakh, angry residents of Erewan stormed the parliament building on Tuesday night.
Hopelessly inferior Armenia
The turning point came after the fall of the city of Shusha (Armenian: Shushi), a strategically and symbolically decisive success of the Azerbaijani troops, which the Karabakh Armenians had initially tried to deny. But this was actually just the ultimate military confirmation of a development in the combat area that had emerged for weeks: Karabakh, supported by Armenia, was hopelessly inferior to Azerbaijan, which was armed with the most modern Turkish and Israeli weapons, at war. open. Behind the scenes, diplomatic efforts by Russia and Turkey resulted in the night’s deal. This had nothing to do with the capture of Shusha or the shooting down of a Russian military helicopter by Azerbaijanis in Armenia on Monday night. The conversations took a long time.
Aliyev, who rudely mocked Pashinyan in a televised address to his people, spoke of a surrender by Armenia, and that is what Armenians should feel. For Aliyev, as he himself put it, the new war that he instigated had the “most favorable outcome” in the conflict that had developed for more than thirty years in more or less hot phases. Pashinyan admitted on Tuesday that the deal was unfavorable for Armenia.
Only a rump area of Nagorni Karabakh remains
Nagorni Karabach, which was formally independent but supported by Armenia, has lost the seven Azerbaijani districts conquered by Armenia as a security cushion during the first war in 1993. They will gradually come back under Baku control until early December. But the historic Soviet autonomous region of Nagorni Karabakh will also not be preserved in its entirety; Under the agreements, Azeris can stay where they came from until Monday night, including in Shusha. Thus, only a rump area of Nagorni Karabach remains, including Stepanakert and Martakert as larger localities.
The exact state of the remaining area is not mentioned. Apparently, however, the Azeris expelled in the early 1990s should be able to return to the seven districts as well as the “historic” Karabakh under the protection of the UN refugee agency. The return of these 750,000 people in total was, in addition to restoring the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, the great objective of Aliyev and his people.
The so-called Lachin Corridor, the best-developed connecting road between the Armenian city of Goris and Stepanakert, will remain open, but will pass through Shusha. The Russian soldiers assure it. The price for this is the realization of a dream that Azerbaijan has long cherished: a land connection with the Azerbaijani enclave Nakhichevan through Armenian territory. There a road will be built, which will also be guaranteed by Russian soldiers and border guards. For Armenia, which is already caught between hostile states, this means a further loss of sovereignty, this time on the southern border with Iran.
Putin is influencing and saving face
The agreement is not a long-term solution to the conflict. Much remains to be clarified. Being very accommodating to Azerbaijanis, he not only approves of the military approach to the “solution” of the Karabakh conflict, which Aliyev has been promoting for years. It is also a success for Turkey, which Aliyev encouraged and supported the war.
It is true that only Putin appeared alongside the two leaders of the South Caucasus, but without Turkish President Erdogan the agreement would not have happened; this realization should certainly hurt the Kremlin, which sees itself as the power of order in the South Caucasus. The Russian president was able to present himself to the outside world as the guarantor of peace in the Caucasus, forcing the hotheads to compromise. In fact, Russia now has even more political influence over Armenia than before. Erdogan, in turn, did not commit to anything by withholding what was supposed to be gentle.
Is it over for Pashinyan?
For Pashinyan, who came to power peacefully with a broad popular movement during the “velvet revolution” in 2018 as a democratic-populist hope, the result of this war is a political disaster. His internal political opponents speak of treason and must not miss the opportunity to take revenge on him after two and a half years of humiliation. The first president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, had already fallen into the Karabakh conflict. Pashinyan, who does not come from Karabakh like previous presidents Kocharyan and Sargsyan, always had to demonstrate his heroic ties to the region in different ways. He failed to prepare society for a compromise with his hated neighbor.
His downfall would also be a satisfaction to Putin. The fact that Pashinyan came to power in a popular uprising that was benevolently accompanied by the West did not suit him better than the subsequent criminal proceedings against his predecessors. Now, under the impression of the tremendous upheaval caused by the war, its suffering and its abrupt end, the already slowed exit of 2018 is on the verge of collapse.
