In Nagorno-Karabakh peace deal, Putin applied a deft new touch - The New York Times

By Anton Troianovski and Carlotta Gall

As a dilapidated old van pulled up at a hillside checkpoint, an Azerbaijani soldier inside scrubbed furiously at his fogged-up window, then cast a glowering look at an Armenian standing just a few feet away.

Just days before, they were on opposite sides of a bitter war. But now the Russian peacekeeper next to them was in charge.

The vicious war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh has settled into a tense truce enforced by heavily armed Russian troops. For Russia, long a provocateur in the broader Caucasus region, the peacemaker role is a switch — a new test and opportunity for a country struggling to maintain its influence in the former Soviet lands.

“They say that things will be OK,” said Svetlana Movsesyan, 67, an ethnic Armenian who remained in the Nagorno-Karabakh capital of Stepanakert, even after narrowly escaping an Azerbaijani strike on the market where she sells dried fruits and honey. “I believe in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

It was Mr. Putin, the Russian president, who by all accounts stopped the war that killed thousands this fall in the fiercest fighting the southern Caucasus has seen this century. But he did so by departing from the iron-fisted playbook Russia has used in other regional conflicts in the post-Soviet period, when it intervened militarily in Georgia and Ukraine while invading and annexing Crimea.

Those tactics, which helped turn those countries into implacable adversaries, seem to have fallen out of fashion in the Kremlin, which analysts say is increasingly applying a more subtle blend of soft and hard power.

The Kremlin’s lighter touch has been visible in the recent Belarus uprising, where Russia refrained from intervening directly and offered only lukewarm support for President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, whose violence against protesters was infuriating the population.

In the negotiations to end the recent war, Mr. Putin leaned on the threat of Russia’s military power, forcing concessions from both sides in the conflict but gaining a grudging measure of trust in the rival camps. Russia has a mutual-defense alliance with Armenia, but Mr. Putin insisted it did not apply to Nagorno-Karabakh. He has maintained close personal ties to President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan.

The strategy seems to have paid immediate dividends, providing the Kremlin with a military foothold in the region and welding Armenia firmly into Russia’s sphere of influence, without alienating Azerbaijan.

“This is an opportunity to play the role of peacekeeper in the classical sense,” said Andrei Kortunov, the director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “I want to hope that we are seeing a learning process and a change in the Russian strategy in the post-Soviet space.”