Armenia-Azerbaijan

Last year, Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh prompted the exodus of almost all of those living there – more than 100,000 people. The question this year is whether Azerbaijan will go further or whether, with talks in late 2023 seeming to yield some progress, it and Armenia finally find a way to peace.

Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh operation appears to bring to a close, at least for now, a decades-long conflict over the contested enclave. In the 1990s, the area’s ethnic Armenian majority, backed by Armenia, declared their own republic, and in the ensuing war ousted Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent areas. For years, talks between Baku and Yerevan went nowhere. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, built up its military and, in 2020, with Turkey’s backing, took back districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh and part of the enclave itself. After six weeks of brutal fighting, Russia stepped in to mediate a truce, which it sent peacekeepers to police.

But with Moscow bogged down in Ukraine, Baku appears to have sensed that it could finish the job. Over the course of 2022, it seized several strategic areas, including along front lines. Then, for over nine months, it blockaded the Lachin corridor, which provided Nagorno-Karabakh access to Armenia and the outside world. In September, its troops swept into the enclave, taking it back in a single day as ethnic Armenians abandoned their homes.

If Nagorno-Karabakh was the most painful bone of contention between Armenia and Azerbaijan, it is not the only one. The two countries dispute their as-yet-not-demarcated border, where their militaries face off, often only metres away from each other. Between the 2020 war’s end and Azerbaijan’s September offensive, border clashes were deadlier than those related to Karabakh itself.

More importantly, Azerbaijan wants a land corridor to Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani exclave in Armenia’s south west that borders Turkey and Iran. Baku believes the Moscow-brokered deal that ended the 2020 fighting committed Yerevan to grant it passage through the corridor. That route would facilitate trade with Turkey but would bypass Iran – hence Tehran’s opposition (It might also help Russia evade sanctions, though that is almost certainly happening already through existing transit points.). Already in September 2022, Azerbaijani troops advanced into Armenia, with some staying deep inside. Several new Azerbaijani positions overlook a gorge through which a road passes to the exclave.

Talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan do have a chance.

Talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan do have a chance. A December agreement, negotiated without third parties present, yielded a prisoner of war exchange, pledged to normalise relations and included Armenian backing for Azerbaijan’s bid to host the world climate summit, COP29, in 2024. Baku and Yerevan say they will continue talks and expect a deal soon, though the thorny border and corridor questions remain.

If negotiations do not bear fruit, Baku may lose patience, as it did over Nagorno-Karabakh. Most likely is that it seeks to pressure Yerevan; more incursions in border areas are not unthinkable. A land grab – seizing the transit route, for example, which would cut off hundreds of thousands of people in Armenia’s southern tip from the rest of the country – would incur fury from Western states, Iran and Russia. It would be a far more brazen step than ousting people from Nagorno-Karabakh, which the world already recognised as Azerbaijani – notwithstanding the trauma inflicted on the Armenians expelled. It is especially hard to imagine that happening in a year when Baku could host the global climate summit. Indeed, Azerbaijani officials insist they harbour no designs on Armenian land and have even proposed an alternative transit route through Iran.

But however bad an idea an attack would be, in an environment where Baku, like many capitals, senses global checks on the use of force fraying, Armenian and Western officials have not entirely ruled out the possibility.