Nagorno-Karabakh conflict precipitates a new regional order - Aljazeera

Asbed Kotchikian

As the all-out war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is still under way with no reliable and definitive reports on either side’s achievements, what is becoming clear is that the repercussions of this war will be larger than the casualty count as a new regional framework is developing to deal with the conflict.

The thawing of the frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been months in the making. After border skirmishes between Armenia and Azerbaijan in July, Ankara increased its rhetoric against Armenia in August, on the centennial of the Treaty of Sevres, and in the wake of Turkish-Azerbaijani joint military exercises in late July and early August. Subsequently, reports of increased Turkish military support and the transfer of military equipment to Azerbaijan began to circulate.

Speeches at the 75th UN General Assembly by the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, only days before the start of large-scale military operations on September 27, also foreshadowed the escalation. In their speeches, both Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev used cautioning language: the former aimed at the growing involvement of Turkey, the latter at the lack of diplomatic progress and continued Armenian intransigence.

Since the early 1990s, negotiations for resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have been deeply entrenched in the OSCE Minsk Process, a Euro-Atlantic framework that also includes Russia and Turkey. However, by many accounts, the Minsk Group has run its course without achieving any tangible results; moreover, there is an increased perception, especially on the part of Azerbaijan, that the Minsk Group is unable or unwilling to provide an effective resolution to the conflict.

The analysis of Russia and Turkey’s official reactions to the escalation provides observers with a sense of how the latest violent thaw might be a prelude to a shift in the framework of the conflict – from a Euro-Atlantic endeavour to a regional one. In that shift, Turkey’s unequivocal support for, and military presence in, Azerbaijan has been met with a relatively passive reaction from Russia, manifested in the form of a call on both sides to restrain from escalating the war – a position that puts the perception that Russia is Armenia’s strategic ally in doubt.

Furthermore, Turkey’s active (albeit seemingly tacit) participation in the conflict in a region that Russia considers to be its back yard can be viewed within the prism of Moscow and Ankara’s gravitation towards a synergy on several foreign policy fronts. Thus, even as Turkey and Russia stand on opposite sides in the Syrian and Libyan civil wars, they have both found some common ground in their mutual distancing from Western political and even military (NATO in the case of Turkey) paradigms. This shift might be explained by Moscow’s attempt to revive the Primakov Doctrine (named after Russian former foreign and Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov), which speculates that Russia should form regional alliances to resist the global hegemony of the US.