Giving up Artsakh

It hasn’t exactly made the headlines in Australia, but there’s an important item of news this week from the Caucasus. Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan has indicated that he is willing to recognise “the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan,” effectively giving up the attempt to preserve the independence of the ethnically-Armenian territory of Artsakh, or Nagorno-Karabakh.

To understand why this matters, including its implications for the larger questions of geopolitics, it’s necessary to have a quick look at some of the history.

Internal boundaries within the old Soviet Union were often drawn with little regard to the wishes of the population or its ethnic composition. When the country fell apart in 1991 many of those boundaries became international borders, and they were fertile sources of ethnic conflict. Four in particular saw serious fighting in the early 1990s, as different groups sought self-determination: the people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (both officially part of Georgia), the mixed Russian-Ukrainian population of Transnistria (officially part of Moldova) and the Armenians of Artsakh (officially part of Azerbaijan).

In each case, Russian intervention imposed a ceasefire, and the conflicts became “frozen” in place. The four territories enjoyed de facto independence but without international recognition. This was an unsatisfactory solution, but it was better than continued warfare, and the peoples concerned did at least have a sort of national freedom; it was a cruder version of what the western powers later imposed in Kosovo.

But it meant that Russia had no interest in pressing forward to a more lasting settlement. It suited Vladimir Putin to maintain the state of tension; in 2008 he provoked Georgia into attacking the South Ossetians, and Russian troops defeated Georgia in a short war. The status quo returned, except that Russia and a handful of its allies then officially recognised the independence of the two Georgian breakaway states (but not of Transnistria and Artsakh).

In 2014 Putin tried to extend the model, after a fashion, to Ukraine. His forces overran Crimea and parts of the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk; Crimea was annexed to Russia, and the other two became frozen with a nominal, unrecognised independence. But there was an important difference: these were not places with ethnic minorities seeking their own state, they were simply territory disputed between Russia and Ukraine. There was no way to disguise this as anything other than Russian expansionism.

In case that was not already clear, it became manifest last year with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which destroyed any notion of Russia as an honest broker in the region. And it also meant that even countries that might want to rely on Russian assistance found that Putin already had his hands full: as Armenia discovered last September, when Azerbaijan broke the truce that had ended their 2020 war and Russia could offer nothing but sympathetic words.

So now, with the Azeris again exerting military pressure, the Armenians are basically on their own. Not only is their patron otherwise occupied, but in the light of what’s happened in Ukraine Artsakh and the other breakaway states look more like Russian projects, attracting correspondingly little western sympathy. And the need for a broad anti-Russian coalition also leads the west to downplay any criticism of rogue actors such as Azerbaijan.

It looks as if Armenia will have to take the best terms it can get, and they’re not going to be very good. Whether the Armenians of Artsakh will be offered anything other than wholesale deportation remains to be seen. It’s possible that a sufficiently vigorous program of ethnic cleansing may eventually awaken western interest, but by then it will probably be too late.

It also remains to be seen what the implications will be for Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. Georgia’s attention is currently engaged with domestic problems, but if they should result in the return to power of Mikheil Saakashvili, who was president during the 2008 war, then expect some pressure to be applied for the recovery of its “territorial integrity” as well – with probably unpleasant consequences for the populations concerned.

As to Transnistria, the war in Ukraine has already put Moldova in the firing line. Its pro-western government has warned repeatedly of the danger of Russian subversion, and of the Russian troops in Transnistria being potentially used to open a new front in the war. But the Transnistrians are the ones who are really isolated, and Russian defeat would leave them with no protection and even less support in the west than the people of Artsakh.

It would be nice to think that Ukraine’s heroic resistance, especially if crowned with victory, would lead to a renewed appreciation worldwide of the importance of self-determination and national freedom. Sadly enough, politics tends not to work that way. Those that find themselves on the wrong side, even through no fault of their own, are likely to pay the price – no matter how sound their case.