The EU and UN must take positive steps and stop the region from descending into yet more violence.
On Sunday, the UN arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh – 30 years too late.
The exodus of almost the entire population, as well as the culmination of a decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse the breakaway region, is almost complete.
For months, a brutal blockade of the ethnic-Armenian enclave by Azerbaijani military forces left the region on the brink of famine. After years of using “lawfare” as a weapon, and failed peace talks, Azerbaijan launched a final surprise attack.
Following a day of heavy shelling, sweeping advances, and desperate scenes, the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities agreed to a ceasefire.
By the morning of 28 September, they announced that the Republic of Artsakh, as Armenians refer to it, will be officially dissolved on 1 January 2024.
A False Friend in Moscow
While it remains unclear what the results will be from peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Brussels, what is clear is that the Armenian people placed their trust in the wrong person.
Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine has distracted Russia from stopping the Azerbaijani blockade as obligated under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). And this wasn’t the first time: Russian forces failed to come to Armenia’s aid during the war in 2020, as well as during fierce clashes last year when Azerbaijan invaded and occupied parts of eastern Armenia.
Before this latest attack, Armenia openly questioned Russia’s status as an effective security guarantor.
In developments that angered Russia, Armenia sent aid to Ukraine and held its first military exercises with the United States. Armenia even recalled its CSTO representative and on 3 October, parliament ratified the Rome Statute – the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes in Ukraine.
Traditional Conflict Resolution Has Failed
But Armenia has been hedging its bets, knowing the West has also been a poor interlocutor.
For months U.S. and EU officials tried and failed to pressure Azerbaijan into lifting the blockade of the Lachin corridor. This failure is why Armenia also made overtures to Iran, a deeply troubling development for Western powers who must stop this latest bout of fighting from collapsing into a much more destructive proxy war.
Because even if the ceasefire holds and Nagorno-Karabakh is reintegrated into Azerbaijan without further violence, Armenia will be desperately searching for new allies to respond to public pressure and maintain control over what land it has left.
There are already fears that Azerbaijan won’t stop after it has taken full control of Nagorno-Karabakh. Rhetoric around creating a “Zangezur corridor” between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan across the southern Armenian district of Syunik has escalated since the latest offensive.
On 2 October, Armenia urged the EU to enact sanctions against Azerbaijan, warning the worst of the violence is yet to come.
Given Azerbaijan’s close military ties to Israel, and the possibility of Israel using Azerbaijani territory to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran has a vested interest in limiting Azerbaijani influence. In late September, Iran warned that any change to borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan would be a “red line.”
How far Iran is willing to go is unclear. But traditional mechanisms to solve territorial disputes are increasingly yielding to violence. For example, international arbitration – hailed as an alternative to military intervention – aggravated tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia for years by putting Nagorno-Karabakh at the center of an environmental and energy conflict.
And elsewhere this blunt tool has radicalized critical partnerships between Turkey and Iraq and in the South China Sea. These cases underscore the need for careful multi-level diplomacy in addressing Armenia’s challenges.
International Help Urgently Needed
In fact, the future of the Caucasus rests on whether Western institutions can offer a robust alternative to already tested mediation efforts.
This means that the EU must ensure this latest Azerbaijani offensive is its last. A permanent peace agreement between both sides, guaranteeing the safety, rights, and freedoms of ethnic Armenians inside an Azerbaijani- controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, must be implemented.
This must also include deploying an international body of human rights observers to ensure the war crimes of 2020 (and in recent days) are not repeated – a plea Armenia echoed in the UN Security Council.
Crucially, the UN and EU must leverage Azerbaijan’s supporters in Turkey and Israel to permanently commit to peace. If this strategy fails, then Western leaders must be prepared to impose sanctions on Azerbaijani oil and gas exports to hamper Baku from purchasing more weapons and political influence from its allies.
At the same time, security and economic support must be increased – offering Armenia an alliance which builds a more resilient and prosperous economy instead of one hooked on remittances from Russia.
This could mean supplying Armenia with modern weaponry alongside expanded military exercises that level the playing field with Azerbaijan. Greater investment in Armenia’s economy, and opening the EU labor market to Armenian workers, would also provide Armenians alternatives to their current exploitative economic relationship with Russia.
If European powers fail to negotiate a permanent peace deal in the Caucasus and cannot offer an alternative to Russia’s waning influence, then the region will be lost to more violence.
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George Meneshian is a Greek-Armenian international relations and security expert specializing in the Middle East and the Caucasus. He currently works as a researcher at the Washington Institute for Defense and Security and heads the Middle East research group of the Institute of International Relations (IDIS) in Athens.
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