The strategy of "no war, no peace" leads to war

On March 8, the heads of the CIA, the FBI, the Intelligence Agency of the Ministry of Defense, and the National Security Agency presented to Congress an annual review of global risks, where they paid attention to the finally unresolved Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

The reasons for the tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the US intelligence services call three problems:

1. The absence of a peace treaty

2. The unresolved issue of delimitation and demarcation

3. Uncertainty of the future of the Armenian-populated territory of Karabakh.

In principle, one cannot disagree with this, and the continuation of the current tension was predicted immediately after the 44-day war in 2020. This is primarily due to the unwillingness of the Armenian community to accept the results of the war, which led to the loss of all the territories of Azerbaijan captured in 1992-1994 and a noticeable weakening of Armenia's position in the open 35-year struggle for the Armenian-populated territory of Karabakh (APTK).

Armenia's strategy for rejecting the APTK has always created a stalemate, which included Yerevan's "compromise line" in the negotiation process with Azerbaijan and the uncompromising position of the Armenians of Karabakh as a kind of "sovereign" and not manageable by Armenia. By the way, this line was adopted and used by international mediators to preserve the status quo in the smoldering conflict. The war revealed not so much the influence of Armenia on the Armenians of Karabakh, but the direct management of this region and the determination of the line of behavior of the Karabakh Armenians. The very fact of concluding a statement on a complete cease-fire and all military operations in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone on November 10, 2022, the huge logistical and human losses of the Armenian Armed Forces and their withdrawal, confirmed Azerbaijan's claim of aggression by Armenia and the seizure of Azerbaijani territories by its regular army, and not by some unspecified "Armenian forces", as interpreted and interpreted by their international documents signed by intermediaries.

The last time we wrote after a local but intense clash on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border on September 13, 2022: "We have repeatedly noted that the persisting tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia is the presence of two opposite approaches to peace. Azerbaijan is building its position on three pillars: 1) a big peace agreement, 2) unblocking all transport communications, 3)delimitation and demarcation of the border. 

Armenia, as a precondition to Azerbaijan's plan, which is supported by almost all international mediators, puts forward a demand for a preliminary determination of the status of the Armenian-populated territory of Karabakh, and more precisely, for granting independence to the Armenians of Karabakh from Azerbaijan.

Despite four-round negotiations with Brussels and multi-round negotiations with Moscow, the positions of the parties have not changed. The only result in this process is the consistent loss of the military-political initiative by Yerevan, which it intercepted in the fall of 1992 and began to squander from the April 2016 battles. If Baku and Yerevan do not come to the denominator based on the status quo following the results of the 44-day war, then, according to the logic of the development of the situation, one should expect further excesses and further loss of Armenia's military-political initiative in the region."

The events on the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia, not recognized and not confirmed by the parties, took place on September 13, 2022, after the Russian oligarch Ruben Vardanyan moved to Karabakh, who took a radical anti-Azerbaijani position that contradicted the Washington-Brussels line on the need to sign a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Despite the encouraging official statement by Pashinyan and Aliyev on October 6 in Prague after a meeting mediated by French President Emanuel Macron and EU President Charles Michel, the promised peace agreement was never signed, and again due to the unresolved status of the APTK. The peace treaty is still linked to the status.

It was to be expected that Azerbaijan, unlike Armenia, would seek to accelerate the process of increasing its presence in the liberated internationally recognized territories, as opposed to Armenia's line of delaying the process of concluding a peace treaty. In this sense, the action of eco-activists on the Lachin road, the removal of Vardanyan from the management of the APTK under pressure from Baku, although they were non-military steps of such a process, but it would be naive to believe that the military instruments of the conflict are already buried deep in the ground. In this sense, the military skirmish between Azerbaijanis and Armenians was expected from the point of view of the logic of mutual steps to aggravate the situation. The shootout on March 5, which claimed the lives of 5 people, occurred after inconclusive negotiations between Baku and representatives of the APTK, where the latter categorically refused to talk about the status of the APTK as part of Azerbaijan.

The situation has once again strained international mediators concerned about another military escalation. The reasons for it are obvious. However, the information support of the military-political steps of the parties to the conflict does not give grounds to talk about a military clash in the coming days and possibly weeks. Military reports took a pause. However, if the status quo of "neither war nor peace" is maintained, a clash may be inevitable, especially in the conditions of fragile geopolitics surrounding the South Caucasus region.

Now they have stopped talking about the upcoming Aliyev-Pashinyan meeting in Brussels with the aim of reaching a final peace agreement due to the escalation of violence. And this will stash the preservation of the uncertainty regime, provoking the next excesses and possibly more large-scale ones that US intelligence is talking about.