Time for Moscow to abandon separatist project in Karabakh
Analysis by Serhey Bohdan

ANALYTICS  31 July 2023 - 11:59

The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia met again in Moscow last week. Meanwhile, the ambiguous statements of the Russian Foreign Ministry on Karabakh, apparently, pushed the revanchist circles in Armenia to a new provocation on the border with Azerbaijan. On July 27, they attempted to transport a convoy of supplies to Karabakh via the Lachin road, ignoring the proposed route via Aghdam with a crystal-clear aim to restore uncontrolled supply to the separatist formations.

In other words, Russian diplomacy is not only competing with Western countries in its endeavour to get a peace treaty signed on its own venue. It continues to make dubious plays with regard to Karabakh. In general, the origins of the current Karabakh disaster were laid precisely by the Moscow leadership of the then-existing USSR. And Moscow bears a special responsibility for overcoming the Karabakh drama.

Emergency negotiations

The Azerbaijani-Armenian negotiations have taken on a cyclical character. Last Tuesday's (July 25) event in Moscow followed a similar Brussels meeting in the middle of the month. Prior to that, the ministers spoke in the US in late June. In May, Bayramov and Mirzoyan held talks at the same venues - Washington, Brussels, and Moscow.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov makes no secret of the fact that his government insists on signing a peace treaty between Baku and Yerevan in Moscow. The meeting of Aliyev and Pashinyan in Brussels on July 15 alarmed the Kremlin. In Brussels, the sides outlined the size of the territories of Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as advanced on the issue of unblocking communication routes. The Russian side responded with a sharp statement on normalisation in the South Caucasus and rushed to organise a meeting in Moscow - which it succeeded in doing.

Of course, whatever the interim results of the dialogue, no peace treaty was signed. Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan, speaks bluntly about the current negotiation marathon: "What is happening is an informal Minsk Group. The group is not really working, but these negotiations are still being conducted by Europe, America, and Russia. The format is contradictory because of the relations within the troika".

Indeed, the Armenian side, to put it mildly, is in no hurry to reach agreements, demanding the restoration of uncontrolled supply to the Karabakh separatists.

Yerevan's tricks and plays and the prolongation of the normalisation process are simply ill-omened by virtue of at least an elementary arrangement of military, diplomatic, and economic capabilities. At the Global Media Forum on July 21 in Shusha, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev warned against sabotaging the normalisation process. Firstly, he noted that "Armenia should make the last step. They have already recognised that Karabakh is Azerbaijan, openly declared it, and now the stage of signing the document has already come." The rights of the population of the Karabakh region can be ensured through the implementation of the relevant norms of the already existing Azerbaijani legislation. Secondly, if the normalisation process is again delayed under the pretext of territorial disputes and so on, Baku will be forced to resort to force - which, as Aliyev stressed, is far from a good option. This is indeed a bad option, but it is not hypothetical, and Baku is able to back up its warnings with true actions at any time.

France is not up to the Caucasus

Yerevan's delay in normalisation is due to the hope that the international political situation will change, above all if the Armenian side manages to draw in external players on its side. Great hopes were pinned on France, but what happened in the end? Yes, Paris sent a military attaché to Yerevan. However, it is hard to imagine that Macron would risk getting involved in adventures in the South Caucasus at the moment. After all, France is being shattered by mass protests, and on Wednesday the last pro-French government was overthrown in West Africa, which the French considered their original sphere of influence. This happened in Niger, the leaders of neighbouring Burkina Faso, CAR and Mali made a pivot toward Moscow earlier. In other words, Macron has no time for Armenians now.

But unexpectedly, Moscow has again taken up the separatist-expansionist project. After the meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders on July 15, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a surprising statement. It caused bewilderment not only in Baku, but also in Yerevan. The Russian side expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that Armenia recognised Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan at the EU summits in October 2022 and May 2023. They say the Russian Federation respects "the sovereign decision of the Armenian leadership", but it "radically changed the fundamental conditions under which the statement of the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia of November 9, 2020, was signed, as well as the position of the Russian peacekeeping contingent stationed in the region".

At first glance, it looks strange - after all, Putin himself called Karabakh "an integral part of the Republic of Azerbaijan" in December 2020. But one must understand the real strategic intent behind the Russian Foreign Ministry's statement - Russia, having realised that Pashinyan, having dropped the dead weight of the Karabakh separatists, was about to leave for the West, decided to put that weight on him again. The other points of the statement were even more explicit in this regard - they expressed concern over "dramatic consequences for Karabakh Armenians" and called on Baku to "take urgent measures to immediately unblock the Lachin corridor".

Incidentally, it is possible that the adoption of such a statement was the price that Pashinyan demanded from the Kremlin for his participation in the Moscow meeting - as late as mid-July, Russian sources were not talking about such a meeting. At a time when the Armenian prime minister is under pressure from revanchist circles in Armenia and the diaspora, such support from Moscow is very useful for him. All the more so because in return Pashinyan simply sent his minister to visit the Russian capital. At the same time, the Armenian side did not make any further concessions that would have made the Kremlin proud.

However, these are details. The essence is that Moscow made such a play. And even after the Azerbaijani side protested, Russian diplomats continued the same course. The pro-Armenian liberal media rushed to write about the most serious crisis in Russian-Azerbaijani relations in the last decades - however, clearly inflated by the Foreign Ministries' remarks.

Gorbachev as the father of Karabakh separatism

The new position of the Russian side makes us remember its copyright on Karabakh separatism. When talking about the history of Karabakh, the supporters of the separatists like to delve into history, looking for convenient periods for themselves and pouring facts devoid of context and, consequently, meaning. All to prove the supposed impossibility of coexistence with Azerbaijanis and, consequently, to justify ethnic cleansing.

But the NKAO lived as part of Azerbaijan until the late 1980s, and whatever problems there were in the region before 1988, they were more like the usual problems in centre-periphery relations that any country has. In the late 1980s, the Karabakh problem did not arise out of some metaphysical reasons like the incompatibility of peoples or nameless historical reasons like the burden of the past.

Everything was the result of concrete actions, and the Soviet Commissar of Railways Lazar Kaganovich used to say that "every accident has a name, a surname and a position". In the Karabakh tragedy, this name is Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. His strange cult as a naive idealist among liberal circles in the West and in Russia led to distorted perceptions of his activities in the 1980s.

These activities appear to have been mediocre and cynical power struggles, with Gorbachev and his team apparently inspired not by Western cliche but by the then-fresh history of Mao Zedong's "cultural revolution" in China in the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, the Soviet leadership kept a close eye on Chinese politics, fearing the Chinese far more than the Americans.

So, on the way to absolute power, Mao started with an adventurist "Great Leap" in the economy. Gorbachev did the same with his "acceleration", ignorant interference in the economy and other "anti-alcohol" campaigns. This only aggravated the situation in the Soviet national economy and, among other things, upset the economic balance in the NKAO of the Azerbaijan SSR. Gorbachev's adventurism caused outrage among experienced managers throughout the USSR, just as Mao's crazy projects angered economic managers throughout China. Power under Mao faltered, and he launched campaigns in which he encouraged all manner of opposition, or, alternatively, provincial authorities, and in 1966 he proclaimed a "Cultural Revolution", inviting people on the ground to take charge and fight the bosses. In essence, he pitted the bosses and a variety of disaffected elements against each other - the latter became known by the names of Hongweibing students and Zaofeng workers.

Exactly two decades later, Gorbachev proclaimed his "cultural revolution" - Perestroika. In order to stifle opposition to his own power, above all in the leadership of the Soviet Union republics, the new General Secretary began to indiscriminately encourage all opposition to the authorities of these republics. Suddenly, various separatist movements had the support of the Soviet centre. The Karabakh project was among the first of these projects. The "workers' collectives of Armenia", strikingly reminiscent of the Hongweibing and Zaofeng, who declared their support for the unrest in Karabakh, instantly became the focus of stories even on the main Soviet TV programme Vremya. And soon blood was flowing like water in the NKAO and many other places, just as it did in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Having made a mess all over the country and weakened his opponents in the centre and in the field, Mao put the army into action, consolidating his absolute power until death. Actually, the Soviet president intended to do the same, stopping the fire he had lit after weakening the republican authorities with the Soviet army, but something went wrong. Gorbachev failed to cope with the elements and ended up in the dustbin of history.

It is time for Moscow to reconsider its approaches

In a nutshell, modern Karabakh and other post-Soviet separatists owe their very existence to the Union centre. The Moscow roots of Karabakh separatism, of course, prevent the Russian side from developing a more balanced approach to the problem. In particular, to understand that Karabakh separatism has become, as they say in business, a toxic asset - something that has fallen in value and has no sale.

Pashinyan is openly trying to get rid of this asset. On Tuesday, he said that Armenia's previous leaders had pursued a policy full of falsehood with regard to Karabakh separatism. Moreover, "in the last thirty years, from day one, the goals declared in the Nagorno-Karabakh issue were unattainable." As a result of this policy, after the defeat in 2020, the Armenian state survived only "by a miracle", and therefore "if someone says that Armenia should continue to live in a confrontational mode, in fact, he is questioning its statehood, existence of the state, sovereignty and independence".

In other words, Pashinyan is not flattered by the Kremlin's curtsies towards the separatists. Some revanchist circles are reacting to signals from Moscow, as exemplified by the recent convoy of supplies they attempted to forcibly transport across the border with Azerbaijan. But there is also a growing realisation among the separatists that it is time to stop the bloody adventure. One of their well-known leaders Samvel Babayan first called on July 20 to give up "imitation of struggle" such as demonstrations and hunger strikes and directly turn to Russia for salvation. And a little later, on July 27, he criticised the dispatch of the convoy of supplies, actually calling for abandoning the remnants of the separatist project and seeking ways to reintegrate the population of Karabakh into Azerbaijan.

Babayan also recalled the futile attempt of the separatists to save their structures by electing Russian businessman Ruben Vardanyan as their boss. Indeed, Vardanyan's forced resignation from the leadership of the separatist structures in February of this year should have shown the Russian side that it was not only immoral but also unrealistic to resuscitate Karabakh separatism for any purpose. Nevertheless, the Russian side launched a dubious combination in Armenian politics even in the absence of serious partners for this purpose.

Meanwhile, Yerevan is rapidly creeping back in a western direction. As the Armenian government distances itself from Russia in every possible way, its alliance with Russia is already only formal. A striking example is Yerevan's longstanding actions within the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), which look more like efforts to break up the CSTO than actual membership. On July 27, Armenia refused to send rescuers to a CSTO nuclear emergency response exercise to be held in Belarus. In January, Yerevan had already loudly refused to host CSTO military exercises, and in May Pashinyan allowed withdrawal from the CSTO. The conflict with Armenia within the CSTO has reached such a level that a significant part of the agenda of the organisation's summit on June 20 was devoted to this very problem.

The state of bilateral relations also looks deplorable. Last week there was a telling exchange of remarks between the heads of the Armenian and Russian parliaments. The Russians tried in vain to persuade the Armenians not to rush to accede to the so-called Rome Statute, on the basis of which the International Criminal Court operates. Nevertheless, Armenia, which the Russian establishment describes as a close ally, decides to accede to the Rome Statute now against the backdrop of the issuance of an arrest warrant against Putin! At the same time, Armenian Economy Minister Vahan Kerobyan admitted that although the Armenian government has not joined the sanctions against Russia, the state has established export controls on certain categories of goods in order to prevent Armenian companies from falling under secondary sanctions. Simply put, it decided to monitor the implementation of Western sanctions against Russia by Armenian businesses.

So, it is likely that in the foreseeable future, Russia will have to reconsider its policy in the South Caucasus. And the ambiguous remarks of the Russian Foreign Ministry regarding the restoration of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity should not deceive anyone. They are primarily connected with attempts to "bind" Pashinyan, who wants to go to the West, to an alliance with Russia by means of a dead weight - the Karabakh separatist project. But the alliance itself has long since become a fiction, and Pashinyan cannot be tied to it, as the value of this project is too dubious, and the separatist structures themselves are collapsing before our eyes.

The Russian authorities will still have to abandon the Karabakh lever created by their predecessors, through which the Moscow masterminds tried to rule the peoples of the Caucasus. It is high time for Moscow politicians to realise what misfortune the Kremlin has created in its time under pseudo-moral pretexts. And it is high time for them to make up their minds and close this project as soon as possible in order to avoid further destructive consequences and to lay the foundations for a better common future of the peoples of the South Caucasus and their relations with Russia. However, this also applies to other separatist adventures, which clearly do not add to Russia's greatness and respect, but look like a petty instrumentalisation of someone else's grief and blood.

Caliber.Az