Strategic realignment

When Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, met the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, in Abu Dhabi on 10 July, they reportedly came close to agreeing a peace treaty. The big question is whether, if these two countries can iron out mistrust and violence born of the territorial conflict, there will still be a role for Russia in the South Caucasus.

To understand the complex geopolitics of the region, you need to go back to the early 19th century, when Azerbaijan and Armenia were ceded to Russia following the Russo-Persian wars. After the Russian revolution, the two countries achieved brief independence between 1918 and 1920 (though not in their present borders) before being invaded and annexed by Russia.

During the Soviet era, the union republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan both felt that Moscow favoured the other. Armenia was unhappy that the Soviet leadership allocated Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority-Armenian exclave surrounded by Azerbaijani-populated lands, to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan was dissatisfied that its borders denied it a land connection to its population in Nakhchivan, an exclave of ethnic Azerbaijanis that could only be reached via southern Armenia.

In the final years of the Soviet Union, as Armenian nationalism began to assert itself during the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika era, Nagorno-Karabakh’s legislature declared its intention to join Armenia. This move eventually led to armed clashes in the region.

The first Karabakh war, which raged between 1988 and 1994, began before the Soviet break-up but continued after the two countries gained their independence. In 1994, after more than 30,000 casualties, Russia brokered a ceasefire. The settlement favoured Armenia, leaving it in control of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as another six Azerbaijani districts surrounding it.

Things began to change when Putin took power in Russia in 2000. Russia’s relations with Azerbaijan improved, partly due to his personal rapport with the then-president, Heydar Aliyev, and his son Ilham, who would succeed him in 2003. After 9/11, when combating international terrorism became a global priority, Azerbaijan put measures in place to prevent the transfer of fighters and weapons through its territory to the war in Chechnya, which further improved relations with Moscow.

At this stage, Azerbaijan was pursuing what it described as a “multi-vector” foreign policy, which allowed it to develop ties with a variety of countries, including the US, Russia and others to whom it sold oil. While remaining in the Commonwealth of Independent States, it did not sign up to the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).

Armenia, by contrast, was a fully participating member of the CSTO. Having signed an Eternal Friendship Treaty with Russia in 1997, this was a clear strategic choice for Armenia and one that was partly motivated by long-standing historical ties.

Russia was traditionally seen as a defender of Christianity in the days of the Ottoman empire. Many people had fled massacres in Western Armenia (in modern-day Turkey) in 1915 to come under the protection of the Russian tsar. But Armenia also saw Moscow as a vital security guarantor against an increasingly militarised Azerbaijan, which was determined to recover control of Nagorno-Karabakh and other areas occupied by Armenia.

Indeed, it was Nagorno-Karabakh which really soured relations between Armenia and Moscow. In 2020, when — aided by Turkey — Azerbaijan launched its offensive to retake the territory, Russia failed to come to the aid of its CSTO ally. This was expected, given that relations had begun to deteriorate in 2018 when Pashinyan came to power in Armenia.

In hindsight, most commentators believe Russia had become tired of Armenia’s intransigence over the plan, agreed in Madrid in 2007, for it to cede back the six districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.

Instead, Moscow brokered a ceasefire agreement and deployed 2,000 peacekeepers along the Lachin corridor, a strip of land connecting Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. But these troops also failed to intervene when an Azerbaijani offensive retook the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, forcing the population of about 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee.

Relations between Russia and Azerbaijan, meanwhile, have gone downhill rapidly. In December 2024, an Azerbaijani civilian airliner was shot down in Russian airspace. Putin apologised, but Azerbaijan insisted on Moscow disclosing the results of the investigation and paying compensation to the victims.

Things got worse at the end of June, when the Russian authorities arrested a group of ethnic Azerbaijanis on suspicion of their involvement in a decades-old murder case, two of whom were killed while being detained. Azerbaijan retaliated by raiding the Baku offices of Russia’s Sputnik news agency and detaining its staff as well as a group of Russian IT workers. When they appeared in court, some of the men appeared to have been beaten in custody.

Azerbaijan’s state media denounced Russia and Russia House, the state-funded Russian cultural agency in Baku, was closed down, with several cultural events cancelled. Security agencies began to enforce documentation checks on all Russian nationals in the country.

At the same time, Azerbaijan and Armenia were already talking about concluding a peace treaty independently, without intermediaries. All this has prompted speculation of a serious loss of influence in the region for Moscow.

However, a complete shutout of Russia in the South Caucasus is unlikely. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan depend on remittance income from their nationals in Russia. Both countries also remain close trading partners with Russia, and while Armenia suspended its membership in CSTO, it has not quit the organisation altogether.

Far more likely is that the two countries, mindful of the growing influence of Turkey in the region and the shifts created by Donald Trump in world affairs, are maneuvering while weighing their options. Geography matters, as neighbouring Georgia demonstrates — efforts to cut ties with Russia by its former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, have been partially reversed by the current government, which increasingly leans towards Moscow.

In the cases of Armenia and Azerbaijan, economic ties, transport links and human connections still favour a relationship with Russia. So, a temporary breakdown in political relations can be mended if all three leaders demonstrate enough statesmanship to sail through the troubled waters.