Saturday, August 10, 2025
The US, Armenia, and Azerbaijan signed a "peace accord" in Washington this week.
This week's agreement in Washington formalizes the end of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, but also places the United States at the center of the region's new reality. This is an interesting and significant change that upends the Moscow-centric deal that was struck five years ago and which placed Russian peacekeepers in the region.
All in all, it's an intriguing move.
In the words of Eurasianet.org:
Trump met separately with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev at the White House on August 8 before the trio formally announced a series of agreements. The centerpiece is an Armenian commitment to grant a long-term lease to the United States to develop a transit corridor traversing Armenian territory and connecting mainland Azerbaijan to the country’s Nakhchivan exclave. Other agreements announced August 8 outline US intentions to strengthen economic ties with both Yerevan and Baku.
What's interesting to me about this is that this agreement effectively displaces the outsize role that Russia appeared to be taking on in the southern Caucasus in the wake of Azerbaijan's surprise attack to retake Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. Baku's victory in 2020, which ended with a Russian-brokered peace deal, led to about one-third of the contested region returning to Azerbaijan's control. It also led to the arrival of about 2000 Russian peace-keepers in the region.
At the time, it seemed pretty clear to a lot of experts on the region that Russia had scored a major diplomatic victory.
Here, for example, are Thomas de Waal's comments from those days:
It's true Russia now emphasizes that the area of de jure Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan. But de facto, it's now a Russian enclave. There are Russian peacekeepers there. Russia has become the security patron, not Armenia. They're even talking about making Russian the language of Karabakh. I guess Karabakhis already speak Russian. So yes, Karabakh is now basically under Russian control. And for Russia, it's a strategic asset in the Caucasus which they don't want to lose -- even though they say that technically, of course, it's part of Azerbaijan.
The deal that was signed this week in Washington relates mainly to Nakhchivan, rather than Nagorno Karabakh, which since Azerbaijan's 2023 offensive has been entirely under Baku's control. Nakhchivan is not a disputed territory, but it has been geographically cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan ever since the outbreak of hostilities between Armenian separatists and the Soviet Azeri government in the late 1980s.
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Since March of this year, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan had been making noise about signing a peace deal, and the agreement signed in Washington is the culmination of those efforts.
What's interesting about the Washington-brokered agreement is that the United States will be charged with the task of monitoring a corridor that would run through Armenia and connect Nakhchivan to the rest of Azerbaijan.
What about the 2,000 Russian peace-keepers? The original plan was for them to remain in Nagorno-Karabakh at least until November of 2025. However, they were withdrawn early, in April of 2024. I guess they were needed elsewhere.
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All of this is a good reminder of what Moscow has lost during the course of the war it has been waging against Ukraine. Whether it's the southern Caucasus or the fall of Moscow's client regime in Damascus, Vladimir Putin's war of choice in Ukraine is weakening Russia's ability to project its influence internationally.
I'll say it again: we'd be fools to let Putin off the hook by imposing a peace deal on Ukraine.
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