While tension remains high between Armenia and Azerbaijan, who accuse each other of having rekindled hostilities for several days at the border of these two Caucasian countries, Russia is active to avoid the aggravation of 'a conflict that would have disastrous consequences in its own area of ​​influence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, July 17, "extremely concerned about the current escalation", even though the two former Soviet Republics had reported the same day a quieter situation after four days of 'clashes, in the border district of Tovouz. These incidents have left at least 17 dead according to the official report. This is one of the most violent confrontation episodes since 2016.

This new outbreak of fever between Armenia and Azerbaijan was raised by President Putin with his Security Council, after which Moscow stressed "the urgent need to guarantee a cease-fire", while saying they are willing to "mediate".

A historic mediator

A role already assumed by the Russians in the past during previous clashes between Yerevan and Baku in conflict for decades around Nagorno-Karabakh, a secessionist mountainous region of Azerbaijan supported by Armenia. Mainly populated by Russian-speaking Armenians, Nagorno-Karabakh, attached in the early 1920s to Azerbaijan by the Soviet authorities, proclaimed its independence in 1991, without it being internationally recognized.

War broke out in the early 1990s and left 30,000 dead before the situation froze following the conclusion of a fragile cease-fire in 1994, already with the intervention of Moscow. Since then, no peace agreement has been reached, and negotiations sponsored by the Minsk Group - a group of international mediators co-chaired by Russia, France and the United States, remain fruitless.

Russia, then chaired by Dmitry Medvedev, had even organized a meeting between the Armenian and Azeri presidents in Kazan in June 2011, to no avail.

The renewed tension raises fears of a conflagration in this part of the Caucasus, when the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliev threatened, on July 7, to retake the territory by force, and that the last confrontations took place far from Nagorno-Karabakh, indicating an extension of the conflict beyond the original territorial dispute.

A beneficial status quo?

However, Russia, a traditional ally of Armenia, where it has a military base, seems attached to the status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh. Although linked to Yerevan in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (OTSC), a politico-military alliance overseen by Moscow, the Russians maintain strong relations with Azerbaijan, which enjoys a large oil rent.

According to the latest data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), published in March 2020, Russia has accounted for almost all of Armenia's arms imports in the past five years. At the same time, and over the same period, the Russians are Azerbaijan's second largest supplier of arms, with 31% of imports, behind Israel (60%).

A strategy that allows the Kremlin to make itself essential and to maintain its role of arbiter in this area that Turkey, the other regional power, cannot play. Notably because of the total support displayed by Ankara for Azerbaijan, a Turkish-speaking and Muslim country, and for its harmful relations with Armenia, against a background of denial of the genocide of Armenians of 1915, perpetrated by the Ottoman authorities. 

The reactivation of tensions between the two Caucasian neighbors comes against a backdrop of heightened competition between Turks and Russians in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, in Libya and Syria, where their geostrategic interests are divergent.

The fact remains that so far, despite the complexity of the relations that Moscow and Ankara have, thanks in particular to the cordial understanding displayed by President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the two powers, who have no interest in confronting each other have always managed to find compromises. A fact that could allow the Caucasus to avoid a larger explosion.

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