Between compulsion and an invitation to peace

In an interview with pro-government Azerbaijani TV channels on September 19, after the foundation-laying ceremony for the “Absheron” offshore field at the Baku Deepwater Plant, Aliyev threatened to restore Azerbaijan's jurisdiction over Karabakh and refused to negotiate with Nikol Pashinyan's government.

The latter, by his actions, starting from the end of last year, used many reasons to call Aliyev on the path of a diplomatic war, which sometimes escalated into real hostilities, as in July this year on the border with Tovuz region.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the military actions in Tovuz region were provoked by the Armenian side. Taking into account, Pashinyan is other provocative steps we can state the planned nature of his actions in order to undermine the negotiation process.

In his interview, Aliyev named several such destructive actions in the framework of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Namely: the demonstrative inauguration of the leader of the Armenian separatists in the former capital of the Karabakh khanate – Shusha; the demonstrative settlement of the occupied territories by Lebanese or Syrian Armenians; the attempts to resuscitate the Serve Treaty which deceased completely in 1923; the creation of an Armenian state in Turkish territories and so on.

We are far from claiming unilateral unproductive behavior of one of the parties to the conflict. The public discussion of Aliyev-Pashinyan on the sidelines of the February Munich security conference showed that the President of Azerbaijan was well versed in terms of the historical side of the issue; he did not leave the Armenian side the slightest chance for the right of a historical presence in the region.

Overall, it is noticeable that the parties used historical and other aspects torpedoing the negotiation process, thereby expressing their unpreparedness for substantive (substantive) negotiations, to which their OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs invite them.

On September 14, the MG co-chairs held intensive consultations in Paris. They spoke separately by phone with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and invited the ministers to meet personally with the co-chairs in the coming weeks to clarify their positions to resume serious substantive negotiations without preconditions.

Taking advantage of the Armenian Independence Day, in his congratulations to the Armenian people, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on September 21 also called on the parties to the Karabakh conflict to resume substantive negotiations on a settlement.

However, the resumption of such negotiations in the near future is unlikely because of the:

1. The unwillingness of the heads of Armenia and Azerbaijan to conduct such a dialogue.

2. Unavailability of the co-chairs, who, in their address, give the sides a few weeks for reflection to further clarify their positions, etc. to resume negotiations.

This can also include the demonstrative strengthening of Azerbaijan-Turkey and Armenia-Russia cooperation, which presuppose an even greater divergence of the positions of the parties at the Minsk Group negotiating table, and the evolution of diplomatic positions into military ones, which inevitably strengthens the language of war in the region.

After the Tovuz events, parallel Azerbaijani-Turkish and Armenian-Russian military exercises took place, each of which provided for the destruction of a potential enemy. This suggests that the military-controlled component of the conflict from the exercise format can grow into a local military one, and become one of the options for enforcing peace, which may be followed by inviting peoples to peace, the project of which was unsuccessfully launched two years ago. Hybrid options are not excluded, they took place in many conflicts around the world, and the Karabakh conflict itself has repeatedly demonstrated this variation.

In this sense, the rhetoric of Pashinyan-Aliyev and the military alliances Azerbaijan-Turkey and Armenia-Russia create the prerequisites for this.