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ollowing the blame for the loss in the Second Karabakh War being put on Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia was plunged into internal political turmoil and a process of self-examination. Although Pashinyan was re-elected after the Karabakh defeat, on June 20, 2021, the opposition and ultra-nationalist social groups could not handle the defeat in the war. Since then, Armenian politics have been divided and polarized between rapprochement with Western countries and reliance on Russia to resolve the Karabakh issue.

Having failed to implement the provisions of the Moscow armistice of November 9, 2020, which ended the Second Karabakh War, Armenians have been reluctant to open the Zangezur corridor. The failure in the implementation of the ceasefire agreement, which stipulated that the Zangezur and Lachin corridors would remain mutually open, put the Azerbaijani side on hold, but the hope of achieving a peace agreement through diplomacy was kept alive.

The Karabakh Armenians, who considered themselves a de facto state in Karabakh and were unable to reconcile with the results of the Second Karabakh War, escalated tensions with the Azerbaijani army in 2022 as if they were a separate state from Armenia and, encouraged by the presence of the Russian Peacekeeping Force in the region, were under the illusion that Azerbaijan could not intervene in Karabakh.

At the same time, the election of Samvel Shahramanyan as president by the representatives of Karabakh Armenians under the name of the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic undermined the spirit of the desired peace agreement.

Azerbaijan suspended aid through the Lachin corridor on the grounds that it was used to carry military equipment, while humanitarian aid through Aghdam would be permitted. In addition, Azerbaijan started to provide relief supplies to Karabakh Armenians, who threatened to burn the aid convoys.

As Karabakh Armenians armed themselves and increased their mine-laying activities, Azerbaijan launched an “anti-terrorist operation” on September 19, 2023. The identified targets were destroyed with precision ammunition. At the same time, Azerbaijan organized point operations in the direction of Karabakh with its law enforcement forces to “restore constitutional order.”

The Russian Peacekeeping Force stated that no civilians were harmed in the operations. After the internal security operation carried out by Azerbaijan, Armenia and Karabakh Armenians did not receive the support they expected from Moscow. They decided to lay down their arms and met with Azerbaijani officials in Khankendi under the supervision of the Russian Peacekeeping Force.

Although no clear decision was reached during the meeting, Karabakh Armenians accepted Azerbaijan’s demands in practice; some soldiers, however, opposed the surrender and retreated to forested areas. Many Karabakh Armenians sought to migrate to Armenia.

In Armenia, the Armenian opposition started demonstrations in Yerevan over allegations that Pashinyan did not provide enough support to Karabakh Armenians. Eight soldiers and former Yerevan mayor Albert Bazeyan were arrested following intelligence reports on a coup attempt by senior Armenian soldiers. Armenian politics was again thrown into turmoil, and the fragile nature of the balance in the Caucasus began to reappear as Armenians who were displaced to Karabakh after 1992 began to return to Armenia.

With the events in Armenia and the acceptance of Azerbaijan’s demands by the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, a new chapter has opened in the Caucasus. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has now entered the final stretch, and the meeting between the leaders of the two countries in Spain, expected to take place on October 5, 2023, offers hope for a final peace agreement.

Do the Armenians have a strategy?

The Armenian strategy from 1992 to 2020 was to rely on the Collective Security Organization, i.e., Russian security guarantees, and to take advantage of the West’s silence in favor of the Armenians. However, Armenian politicians failed to interpret the changing global and regional balances. Putting aside the practice that a state can engage in an armed conflict on behalf of another state – only if its interests require it – Armenia assumed that the “forced” status in Karabakh was permanent.

With Armenian politics caught between Westernism and Russianism, the country has been unable to choose between the politics of threats and reconciliation. As a matter of fact, Pashinyan was able to say “Karabakh is Azerbaijan’s territory” while threatening Azerbaijan on social media. The reason for such ups and downs is Armenia’s economic, political, and military incapacity is the reason for such ups and downs.

Having no access to the sea and being landlocked between four neighboring countries, Armenia has transformed its economic vulnerability into military incapacity with political division. For this reason, the Yerevan administration has delegated the Karabakh strategy to other countries and has no long-term strategy or action plan.

Armenia’s strategic mistakes, especially regarding Russia’s attitude, is worth mentioning at this point. In this context, the military exercise with the United States determined Russia’s attitude towards the Pashinyan administration and pushed Moscow to be more neutral towards Karabakh.

Meanwhile, Armenia’s membership in the International Criminal Court made Moscow uneasy with the ICC being criticized by the Russians for the arrest warrant issued against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Pashinyan’s declaration that the Russian presence in the region has been weakened after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and sending his wife, Anna Hakobyan, to Ukraine to provide humanitarian aid made Pashinyan’s Westernist and “unreliable” side explicit in Moscow’s eyes.

How should Azerbaijan’s current actions in Karabakh be interpreted?

Since 1992, Azerbaijan, with the motto “Karabakh is Azerbaijan!”, has been determined to connect Karabakh to its homeland, first through diplomacy and then through military means. In this respect, Azerbaijan has successfully implemented its diplomatic maneuvers and maximized its military readiness under the favorable conditions of political stability and the economic gains of the energy sector. Carrying out a long-term defense program, Azerbaijan did not delay its responses during periods of heightened tensions.

While Azerbaijan fulfilled the requirements of the document signed after the November 9 ceasefire, it expected the same from Armenia. In this framework, the mutual functionalization of the Lachin and Zangezur corridors was regarded as a clear parameter. On the other hand, no concessions were made towards Karabakh’s goal of becoming an independent state through political actions, and a policy was put forth towards the integration of Karabakh Armenians into Azerbaijan.

An active Azerbaijani strategy was put into practice in the face of the so-called Karabakh presidential election, which Karabakh Armenians wanted to dictate as a fait accompli. The main principle of the strategy is based on the concept of a “unitary Azerbaijan.” In this respect, the separatist actions of the Armenians were not tolerated.

Recent developments indicate that Azerbaijan is initiating a normalization process in Karabakh. Steps have also been taken to integrate Karabakh into Azerbaijan’s infrastructure and administrative system. In this context, electricity from Armenia was cut off and connection to the Azerbaijani grid was established.

Within the scope of normalization, Azerbaijan intends to ensure full control of Karabakh’s administrative, civil, and security organization in the coming days. However, the Baku administration’s ultimate goal in all these developments seems to be to sign a permanent peace agreement.

Armenia today is going through the most difficult and bleak times in its history. Armenians have a poor and growingly poorer country, and a feudal-criminal-oligarchic political regime with collapsed science and education sectors. The country suffers from limited resources that are decreasing year by year and high emigration, above all of the intelligentsia, while the defeat in the Karabakh War in the fall of 2020 caused the loss of military equipment and military property worth $4 billion.

After running along international corridors with requests to influence Azerbaijan during the recent war, today, Armenia is suffering from a multibillion-dollar external debt with a $350 million state budget. This is the real legacy of the “Third Republic of Armenia”, with which today its citizens have to live. And there appears no exit in sight.

The principal reason for this state of affairs is that Armenia has not been able over the course of the 30 years of its existence to put into practice the ideology on which it was created and for which it has exited all this time. The meaning of the existence and all state activity of the “Third Republic of Armenia” was the implementation of the idea of Miatsum: the reunification of the Yerevan and Karabakh Armenians within the borders of a single state and the expansion of their “living space” through, first, the occupation and seizure of Azerbaijani lands, and, then, the territories of other neighbors such as the now Georgian region of Ninotsminda/Javakh with a predominantly Armenian population.

The “Third Republic of Armenia” was born thanks to the Miatsum movement, according to which it acquired its own state ideology, which very soon turned into a national idea and transformed the Armenian people in the diaspora into a modern political nation.

Over the last quarter of a century after the end of the First Karabakh War of 1988-1994, for the sake of the concept of Miatsum, “unification” in Armenian. Armenia has spent excessive funds on the maintenance of the occupation regime in Karabakh. Any true observer, however, could understand that it was not Armenia that occupied Azerbaijani Karabakh, but the separatist regime of Karabakh, which named itself Artsakh, occupied Do you mean occupied Karabakh, and took over all its human, material, and financial resources.

The total defeat of Armenia in the war with Azerbaijan in the fall of 2020 destroyed not only its army and half of its military infrastructure, but also inflicted a severe ideological defeat.

The total defeat of Armenia in the war with Azerbaijan in the fall of 2020 destroyed not only its army and half of its military infrastructure, but also inflicted a severe ideological defeat. It exposed the fact that the idea of Miatsum, which Armenia has lived with for the past thirty and more years, was, in fact, an absolutely unviable utopia. At least two generations of Armenians, who believed in it with reverence and suffered hardships for the sake of its realization, turned out to have been misled. The current internal political situation in Armenia perfectly proves this: the split in Armenian society took place precisely on the issue of each individual citizen’s subjective attitude on Miatsum.

Supporters of the current Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan are ready to abandon Karabakh and the idea of Miatsum for the sake of a new future for their country, while supporters of his main opponent in the early parliamentary elections, former president Robert Kocharyan, count on the reincarnation of Miatsum ideology and believe in a victory in a new war with Azerbaijan, but now not only for Karabakh, but also for Nakhichevan. Miatsum is the cornerstone of the “Third Republic of Armenia”. In October-November of last year, the latter was split by the Azerbaijani army, after which Armenia plunged into internal political chaos, which we are all witnessing today.

Today, Armenia does not have a state ideology and its people have no national idea; therefore, the crisis is characterized by longevity, an uncompromising attitude, and fierceness.

After the collapse of the USSR, the idea of Miatsum became a kind of ticket for the post-Soviet Armenians into the Armenian diaspora. This gave it additional value and significance in the eyes of the Yerevan and Karabakh Armenians, in whose eyes Miatsum became a kind of “compensation” for the “genocide” – not for all Armenians, but only for post-Soviet Armenians, as a result of which the topic of “genocide” began to be perceived by them as optional in relation to the idea of Miatsum.

The Armenian diaspora, following the post-Soviet Armenians, was also forced to recognize the idea of Miatsum as a priority, so as not to shatter the sense of a national-religious Armenian unity from within. This ultimately led to the formulation of a new pan-Armenian ideology or the ideological triad “Armenia – Diaspora – Artsakh.” The defeat of Armenia in the recent war and the actual destruction of the occupation regime, which the Armenians themselves called “Artsakh,” put an end to this ideological structure despite what its supporters might claim.

Even Russia’s intervention in the war and the transition to temporary military control of a part of the Azerbaijani territory to Russia will not allow the Armenians in the medium term to hold out, at least in part, of Karabakh. The Kremlin is still able to slow down the complete return of all Azerbaijani territories under the official jurisdiction of Baku and the subsequent resettlement of Armenians from Karabakh, but it is no longer able to guarantee this in the future.

From day to day, Baku is multiplying its official claims against Moscow, which cannot adequately counter them or offer intelligible and comprehensive answers. As soon as the number of these claims reaches a critical mass, Azerbaijan will launch a diplomatic, political, and military offensive, which in the medium term will lead to the restoration of its control over its entire territory and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Karabakh. This will be the final blow to the currently moribund idea of Miatsum, which will automatically put an end to the history of the “Third Republic of Armenia”.

To maintain its presence in the South Caucasus region, today, Russia has to accept great losses of resources and prestige, and material sacrifices. All this for the sole purpose of preserving the current statehood of Armenia in order for it to recast its ideological basis – but always in line with Russian foreign policy. Otherwise, the Kremlin understands very clearly that Moscow will finally lose the South Caucasus region.

The agony of the “Third Republic of Armenia” with Russia’s resuscitation efforts will continue until either a new and acceptable Armenian state ideology is developed in the Kremlin or for the Kremlin, or until the Kremlin runs out of opportunities to maintain Armenia’s statehood. It is very likely that the patient will not be saved, since the spirit of Miatsum, which was the driving force behind the existence of the “Third Republic of Armenia”, is not immortal and will perish with the current generation of Armenian politicians.

The early parliamentary elections in Armenia on June 20 are unlikely to change this situation. Unless, of course, Nikol Pashinyan, who most probably will win the elections, himself declares Miatsum as dead and that Karabakh. Although in the upcoming elections there is also the option for the public to decide that Pashinyan is part of the past and that his predecessors belong in distant history.