Azerbaijani gambit

Vladimir Putin, having traveled to Baku, has earned significant dividends for Russia. Ilham Aliyev, having hosted Putin, secured a strategic victory for Azerbaijan. The only loser is Armenia, whose ruling administration, instead of an adequate political and diplomatic response to this step of the Russian-Azerbaijani alliance, kept silent like a sheep carelessly munching on the pasture grass. It is of little interest to the current Armenian authorities if it is being led to the slaughter or only to be sheared. What happened at the adult table, where Armenia is merely a menu item?

Putin has refrained from traveling abroad because of the sanctions regime and the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. Russia is extremely interested in a controlled transportation corridor from Central Asia to Turkey and Russia to diversify sanctioned trade chains. As always, Ilham Aliyev is around at the right moment. The latter is at the peak of his political career, maneuvering quite skillfully between the United States, the European Union and Russia.

Putin’s homage atHeydar Aliyev’s grave and the Russian leader’s laying of flowers on the ‘Shehid Alley’ were symbolic embodiments of the success of this policy, as was the earlier visit of the U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan to the annexed Armenian town of Shushi. At least Putin did not go to Artsakh, and the U.S. ambassador to Stepanakert – this is how the so-called Armenian ‘opposition’ and its supporters in Moscow and Rostov, Paris and Hamburg, Glendale and Boston are making excuses, turning a blind eye to all the other outcomes of this meeting and the decision to open a Russian consulate in Stepanakert. And all of this, of course, is due to the special chemistry between Vladimir Vladimirovich and Robert Sedrakovich Kocharyan or Anthony Blinken and Nikol Pashinyan, and not to the attempts of Russia or the United States to bargain something else in return for such a visit. If they succeed, the next stop for the current Armenian ‘opposition’ in 10 years will be to thank the Kremlin and the White House for the fact that their next trip to Baku did not include a visit to Azerbaijani-occupied Yerevan.

Azerbaijan receives contracts (albeit short-term) to supply gas to Southern Europe, particularly Serbia and Italy, in exchange for defensive and offensive weapons that can be used against Armenia. By helping Russian state-owned companies bypass the sanctions regime, the Aliyev family is earning substantial lucrative profits on top of its untold wealth. The signing of strategic agreements between Russia’s Gazprom and Azerbaijan’s SOCAR has not worsened Baku’s perception at the national level in Ukraine, even though the latter has been engaged in a bloody war with Russia for more than two years and promotes a moralising narrative of ‘bloody Russian money’ that the whole world should supposedly reject. Azerbaijan has applied to join BRICS, China’s discussion club that includes Russia, Iran and India, among others. Finally, Russia now officially supports the so-called ‘transportation corridor between the western regions of Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan’ and, together with Aliyev, demands that Armenia transfer formal control over Syunik to the Russian side. Baku has one goal – to show the West that Aliyev has other options to solve the tasks at hand, if there is no more convincing support and more favorable offers than the Russian and Chinese ones. All this does not prevent Aliyev’s propaganda from portraying Armenia as Russia’s biggest accomplice in circumventing sanctions in front of the US and its allies on the Ukrainian front. Ilham Aliyev skillfully maneuvers between all actors of international politics, whose interests and policies can affect Azerbaijan, and collects the cream from their contradictions, conflicts and disagreements. He is a servant of many masters, ready to betray them in time, be them Russian, American, Chinese, or Turkish. To betray in time is not to betray, but to anticipate. After all, Russia, even when it had influence on Azerbaijan, turned a blind eye to the helicopter shot down treacherously in November 2020, to the murder of Russian peacekeepers in Artsakh in September 2023, and now it will swallow any offense, making it be difficult for everyone else to outdo such Russia in pleasing Azerbaijan.

Nikol Pashinyan, being a cowardly, amateurish and deeply traumatized ‘politician’, reacted to such an important diplomatic casus, provided by the authoritarian leaders of Moscow and Baku, in an on-duty and belated manner. The Armenian people never heard a meaningful reaction from the current administration to the meeting of Armenia’s two ‘partners’ on the November 9, 2020 Trilateral Statement and the statements made within the framework of that meeting, much less reminders about the fate of Armenian citizens illegally detained in Azerbaijan. Pashinyan does not hide his blunt contempt for the Artsakh issue, refusing to use the very word ‘Artsakh’ and talking about the contradiction of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue with ‘Armenia’s state interest’ and the related ‘annulment of Armenian statehood’. Nikol Pashinyan’s administration prefers to be the object of Baku’s relations with all centers of power, exposing Armenia and Armenians to constant existential danger. Realism defines international politics everywhere, except for Nikol Pashinyan’s ‘Real Armenia’.