Michael Totten has written a good piece about the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, albeit as seen from the Azerbaijan side of things.

We tend to think that the Soviet Union broke up ‘peacefully’ (just as we inaccurately think that South Africa’s transition from apartheid was ‘peaceful’). This is because the vastness of the drama of Russia struggling to adopt democracy left smaller but serious problems in the diplomatic shade.

But one especially nasty conflict took place between Armenia and Azerbaijan over a disputed mountainous region called ‘Higher Karabakh’, which Armenia claimed it had to defend as the Azeris were bent on focing its Armenian population out. Heavy casualties and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.

To cut a long and dismal story short, Armenia now has de facto control of NK plus large tracts of Azeri territory to the south and west. Yet the ‘island’ of Azerbaijan territory between Armenia and Iran (Nakhichevan Autonomous Region) is still there.

Back in 1992/93 there was a willingness on the part of senior Western circles to make a personal effort to move the NK problem towards some sort of negotiated peace. I joined FCO Minister Douglas Hogg on a visit to both Baku and Yerevan. We flew back to London agreeing that there was scope for progress, but knowing in our dark hearts that HM Government would not invest any serious resources in achieving one.

Thus an unhappy stalemate drags on, with a group of countries (the Minsk Group) led by the USA, Russia and France trying to broker a reasonable outcome of some sort.

The problem is that this dispute is partly about NK itself, but also about many other issues.

Oil: Azerbaijan has lots.  

Armenia’s existential insecurity: stemming from the ‘genocide‘ (or not) back in 1915 of huge numbers of Armenians at the hands of Turks.

Iran: far more Azeris live in Iran than in Azerbaijan. So the NK conflict could lead to greater upheavals if it ran out of control.

Maybe some sort of existential reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia can help? Things are moving here, at least, with the Turkish President recently visiting Armenia in a visit that deserves to be called historic.

What does Russia want?

Back in the mid-1990s I went to see the then Russian special NK negotiator formally charged with trying to help cut a deal between the two sides. He opened a glass-fronted cabinet and took out exhibits from what he called his Museum of Diplomatic Curiosities, documents featuring negotiations between Baku and Yerevan which had broken down over the placing of commas and words like ‘the’. He shrugged, seemingly content to let these two puny states carry on getting nowhere.  

Would Russia somehow prompt trouble if it looked as if there really was a prospect of a negotiated outcome between Armenia and Azerbaijan over NK, and more widely? Not difficult to do.

I suspect that whatever the formal policy might be, under current management Russia’s basic instinct is to punish these two former Soviet republics for breaking away from Mother Russia, which means letting them twist sadly in the wind until Russia decides what should happen – and decides to bring it about, on Russia’s terms.