Putin’s Hidden Game in the South Caucasus

By Thomas de Waal

On April 17, a column of Russian tanks and trucks passed through a series of dusty Azerbaijani towns as they drove away from Nagorno-Karabakh, the highland territory at the heart of the South Caucasus that Azerbaijan and Armenia had fought over for more than three decades. Since 2020, Russian peacekeepers had maintained a presence there. Now, the Russian flag that flew over the region’s military base was being hauled down.

Although it caught many by surprise, the Russian departure further consolidated a power shift that began in late September 2023, when Azerbaijan seized the territory and, almost overnight, forced the mass exodus of some 100,000 Karabakh Armenians—while Russian forces stood by. Azerbaijan, an authoritarian country that shares a border with Russia on the Caspian Sea, has emerged as a power player, with significant oil and gas resources, a strong military, and lucrative ties to both Russia and the West.

Meanwhile, the region’s other two countries, Armenia and Georgia, have been experiencing tectonic shifts of their own. In the months since Azerbaijan’s takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia, a traditional ally of Russia, has swung ever more firmly toward the West. The ruling party in Georgia is breaking with three decades of close relations with Europe and the United States and seems intent on emulating its authoritarian neighbors. In May, the Georgian parliament passed a controversial law to crack down on “foreign influence” over nongovernmental organizations—a law that derives inspiration from Russian legislation and sends Moscow a signal that it has a dependable partner on its southern border.

Obscured in this reordering of the South Caucasus are the complex motives of Russia itself. The region—known to Russians as the Transcaucasus—has held fluctuating strategic significance over the centuries. The imperial touch was not as heavy there as in other parts of the Russian Empire or Soviet Union. Following the end of the Soviet Union, Moscow tried to keep its leverage through manipulation of the local ethnoterritorial conflicts there, maintaining as many troops on the ground as it could.

But the war in Ukraine and the Western sanctions regime has changed that calculus. By deciding to remove troops from Azerbaijan, the Kremlin is acknowledging that economic security in the South Caucasus—for now at least—is more important than the hard variety. Russia badly needs business partners and sanctions-busting trade routes in the south. And at a time when it is increasingly squeezed by the West, it also sees the region as offering a coveted new land axis to Iran.

BAKU’S BIG PLAY

At first blush, the unilateral Russian withdrawal from Nagorno-Karabakh this spring was puzzling. For much of the past three decades, Azerbaijanis and Armenians have fought over the territory, which is situated within Azerbaijan but has had a majority ethnic Armenian population. In 2020, Azerbaijan reversed territorial losses it had suffered in the 1990s and would have captured Nagorno-Karabakh, as well, were it not for Russia’s last-minute introduction of a peacekeeping force, mandated to protect the local Armenian population. Those peacekeepers stood by, however, as Azerbaijan marched into Karabakh last September. Still, they had a mandate to stay on until 2025. As well as projecting Russian power in the region, they could also have facilitated the return of some Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Of course, for Russia, the 2,000 men and 400 armored vehicles that were transferred out of the territory provide welcome reinforcements for its war in Ukraine. But that was not the whole story. By deciding to leave the region, Russia handed Azerbaijan a triumph, allowing its military to take unfettered control of the long-contested territory. For most Armenians, it was a fresh confirmation of Russia’s abandonment. Almost immediately, observers speculated that some kind of deal had been struck between Russia and Azerbaijan.

As the largest and wealthiest of the three South Caucasus countries, Azerbaijan has profited most from Russia’s shift. It is a player in East-West energy politics, providing oil and gas that is carried by two pipelines through Georgia and its close ally Turkey to European and international markets. Sharing a border with Iran, it also serves as a north-south gateway between Moscow and the Middle East. It helps that the Azerbaijani regime—in contrast to Armenia’s democratic government—is built in the same autocratic mold as Russia’s. Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s longtime strongman president, has even deeper roots in the Soviet nomenklatura than does Russian President Vladimir Putin: his father was Heydar Aliyev, a veteran Soviet power broker who was also his predecessor as the leader of postindependence Azerbaijan, running the country from 1993 to 2003. The younger Aliyev and Putin also know how to do business together, in a relationship built more around personal connection and leadership style than on institutional ties.

Relations were not always so good. In tsarist and Soviet times, Moscow took a more overtly colonial approach toward the Muslim population of Azerbaijan, giving Russian endings to surnames and imposing the Cyrillic script on the Azeri language. Azerbaijanis still resent the bloody crackdown in 1990, when, during the last days of the Soviet Union Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent troops into Baku to suppress the Azerbaijani Popular Front Party, killing dozens of civilians. During much of the long-running Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Moscow gave more support to the Armenians.

After the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, however, Russia began a new strategic tilt toward Azerbaijan. The withdrawal of peacekeepers this spring looks like the key component of a full Baku-Moscow entente. Just five days after the Russian peacekeepers left, Aliyev traveled to Moscow, where he discussed enhanced north-south connections between the two countries. After the talks, Russian Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev said that Azerbaijan was upgrading its railway infrastructure to more than double its cargo capacity—and allow for much more trade with Russia.

For Moscow, this is all part of a race with the West to create new trade routes to compensate for the economic rupture caused by the war in Ukraine. Since the war started, Western governments and companies have been trying to upgrade the so-called Middle Corridor, the route that carries cargo from western China and Central Asia to Europe via the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus—thereby bypassing Russia. For its part, Russia has been trying to expand its own connections to the Middle East and India via both Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan, thanks to its favorable geographical position and nonaligned status, has been able to play both sides. It is a central country in the Middle Corridor. It is increasing gas exports to the EU, after a deal with the European Commission in 2022. But it is also ideally positioned to trade with Russian energy exporters, too. In a report released in March, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies suggested that Azerbaijan, working with its close ally Turkey, could help create a hub for Russian gas to reach foreign markets without sanction. And because of Azerbaijan’s growing status as the regional power broker, it also could enable Russia to realize its aims of building stronger connections to Iran.

TRAINS TO TEHRAN

A key part of Russia’s shifting ambitions in the South Caucasus is to rebuild overland transport routes to Iran. The most attractive route is the one that Azerbaijan calls the Zangezur Corridor, a projected road and rail link through southern Armenia that would connect Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani exclave that borders both Iran and Turkey. By reopening the 27-mile route, Moscow would have a direct rail connection to Tehran, which has become an important arms supplier to Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

In fact, this north-south axis would effectively revive what was known as the Persian Corridor during World War II—a road-and-rail route running north from Iran through Azerbaijan to Russia that supplied no less than half the lend-lease aid that the United States provided the Soviet Union during the conflict. By a strange twist of fate, this same axis is now vital to Moscow in its current struggle against the United States and the West.

A long-closed route through Armenia would connect Russia with Iran.

Back in November 2020, the Russians thought they had a deal to get this route open when Putin, Aliyev, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a trilateral agreement that formally halted that year’s conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and introduced the Russian peacekeeping force. The pact included a provision calling for the unblocking of all economic and transport links in the region, and it specifically mentioned the route to Nakhichevan across Armenia. Moreover, it also stated that control over this route would be in the hands of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or the FSB.

Since then, the corridor has remained closed because Armenia and Azerbaijan could not agree on the terms of its operation. Yet Russia’s insistence that its security forces should be in control has remained constant. On his return from Moscow in April, Aliyev also alluded to this, telling an international audience that the 2020 agreement (whose other provisions are all now redundant) “must be respected.” Opening the corridor, then, may be the essence of the new deal between Azerbaijan and Russia: in return for Russia pulling its forces out of Karabakh—a step that handed the Azerbaijani leadership a major domestic victory—Azerbaijan may acquiesce to Russian security control over the planned route across southern Armenia.

If such a plan is carried out, it would amount to a coordinated Azerbaijani-Russian takeover of Armenia’s southern border—a nightmare for both Armenia and the West. The Armenians would lose control of a strategically vital border region. The United States and its Western allies would see Russia take a big step forward toward establishing a coveted overland road and rail link with Iran. Moreover, Armenia on its own lacks the capacity to prevent Russia and Azerbaijan from acting.

ARMENIAN ALIENATION

No former Russian ally has seen such a dramatic breakdown in its relations with Moscow as Armenia. The two countries have a long historical alliance built on their shared Christian religion. Russia was the traditional protector of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and Armenians who lived in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union tended to enjoy more upward social mobility than other non-Slavs: some of them reached the highest echelons of the Soviet elite.

But all that has changed over the past few years. Russian relations with Armenia began to cool off in 2018, when Armenia’s Velvet Revolution brought Pashinyan, a populist democrat, to power. That transition was barely tolerated in Moscow, which feared another “color revolution” bringing an unfriendly government to power on its border. After the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, Moscow continued to support the Armenians, but relations were increasingly strained. For Yerevan, Azerbaijan’s seizure of the territory last fall, with Russian acquiescence, became the last straw.

As the Kremlin failed to honor its security commitments to Armenia, Pashinyan began to move his country decisively toward the West. Last fall, he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pushed Armenia to formally join the International Criminal Court, meaning that Putin, who has an ICC arrest warrant on his head, could theoretically be arrested if he sets foot in Armenia. And in February, Pashinyan also suspended Armenia’s participation in the Russian-led military alliance, the Collective Treaty Security Organization. Some European politicians have now mooted the idea of eventual EU membership for Armenia.

With Nagorno-Karabakh removed from the equation, Pashinyan is also pressing harder to reduce his country’s dependence on Russia. Armenia has asked Russia to remove the Russian border guards who have been stationed in Armenia’s Zvartnots airport since the 1990s by August 1. Other Russian border guards who are stationed on Armenia’s borders with Iran and Turkey will stay for now, but the deployment in 2023 of an EU civil monitoring mission in southern Armenia shows where the Armenian government’s strategic preferences lie.

Ethnic Armenians fleeing to Armenia following Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh, September 2023 David Ghahramanyan / Reuters

Armenia’s pivot to the West, however, comes at an extremely unfavorable moment. Flush with victory and benefiting from strong ties with both Russia and Turkey, Azerbaijan shows no signs of letting up its pressure on Armenia. Meanwhile, the other big regional powers around Armenia—Iran, Russia, and Turkey—are aware that the West is overextended. Despite their many differences, they have a common agenda, shared with Azerbaijan, to cut down the West’s strategic profile in the region and elevate their own. In April, for example, top U.S. and European officials in Brussels announced an economic aid package for Armenia. In response, Iran, Russia, and Turkey each issued almost identical statements deploring the West’s dangerous pursuit of “geopolitical confrontation,” by which they meant Western intervention in Armenia.

The new confrontation over Armenia is not just a matter of posturing. Pashinyan’s government has evidently concluded that its future lies with the West. Although this shift makes sense in the longer term, it carries many shorter-term risks. Armenia is overwhelmingly dependent on Russian energy and Russian trade: Moscow supplies 85 percent of its gas, 90 percent of its wheat, and all the fuel for its lone nuclear power plant, which provides one-third of Armenia’s electricity. And Armenia’s own economy is still heavily oriented toward the Russian market. These ties give Moscow enormous economic leverage; it could seek to bend the country to its will by sharply raising energy prices or curtailing Armenian trade.

Meanwhile, Armenian officials and experts fear even more direct military threats to the country’s sovereignty. One is that Azerbaijan, in coordination with Russia, has the military capacity to seize control of the Zangezur Corridor by force, if it chooses to, in a few hours. Another is that rogue domestic forces in Armenia, with foreign backing, could try to overthrow the Pashinyan government by violence or organized street protests in an effort to destabilize the country and allow a more pro-Russian government to take power.

These threats come in parallel to diplomacy. Azerbaijan continues to pursue bilateral talks with Armenia to reach a peace agreement to normalize relations between the two countries. Whether the two historic adversaries can avoid sliding back into war depends largely on the extent to which Western powers, despite their commitments in Ukraine, are prepared to invest political and financial resources to underwrite such a settlement.

GEORGIAN AMBIGUITY

As if the threat of a dangerously weakened Armenia and a new Russian-Iranian land corridor were not enough, the West also faces a growing challenge from Armenia’s neighbor Georgia. As Armenia tries to move West, the government of Georgia, a country that has enjoyed huge support from Europe and the United States since the end of the Cold War, is seemingly doing the opposite.

Post-Soviet Russia has a long history of meddling in post-Soviet Georgia, and most Georgians retain a deep antipathy to Moscow. In 2008, Georgia cut off diplomatic relations after Russian forces crossed the border and recognized the two breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent. A 2023 poll found that only 11 percent of Georgian respondents wanted to abandon European integration in favor of closer relations with Russia.

Nonetheless, the ruling Georgian Dream party—founded and funded by Georgia’s richest businessman, Bidzina Ivanishvili, and in power since 2012—is burning bridges with its Western partners. The most conspicuous feature of this shift, although not the only one, is the controversial “foreign influence” law, which seeks to limit and potentially criminalize the activities of any nongovernmental organization that receives more than 20 percent of its funding from abroad—meaning nearly all of them. The move sparked mass protests, especially from young people, who call it “the Russian law” because it mimics Moscow’s own 2012 “foreign agents” law and seems similarly designed to stifle civil society and remove checks on the arbitrary exercise of power. The law is also a slap in the face for the European Union, coming just months after Brussels formally offered Georgia candidate status and a path toward accession to the union.

Most Georgians retain a deep antipathy to Moscow.

Georgian Dream’s first priority seems to be domestic: to consolidate its own power and eliminate opposition. The party is tightly focused on trying to win—by whatever means possible—an unprecedented fourth term in office in Georgia’s October parliamentary elections. Still, the sharp anti-Western turn sends friendly messages to Russia. Another refrain of the ruling party is that it will not allow Georgia to become a “second front” in the war in Ukraine.

Just as the Azerbaijani leadership does, the men who run Georgia understand Moscow. Ivanishvili, who as Georgian Dream’s kingmaker is the country’s effective ruler, made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s and learned to win in the ruthless business environment of that era; a coterie of people around him have made plenty of money from Russia since the Ukraine war began. Moreover, Georgia has opened its doors to Russian business and banking assets, and direct flights between the two countries have resumed. The Georgian elite seems prepared to pay the cost: one insider, former Prosecutor General Otar Partskhaladze, is now under U.S sanctions.

If the Georgian opposition manages to overcome its historic divisions and win this fall—no easy task—Georgia’s pro-European trajectory will resume. But much could happen before then. Perpetual crisis in Tbilisi now seems assured for the remainder of this year, if not beyond. Neither side will back down easily. The government has lost all credit with its Western partners, yet to call on Russia for assistance would be extremely dangerous. The uncertainty adds another wild card to any larger calculations about the strategic direction of the South Caucasus.

LOSING CONTROL

Putin recognizes the value of the South Caucasus to Russia, but since 2022, he has had little time for it. Moscow has no discernable institutional policy toward the region as a whole—or for other regions beyond Ukraine. The war has accentuated the habit of highly personalized decision-making by a leader in the Kremlin who seems uninterested in consultation or detailed analysis.

This has left the region’s three countries with strikingly different approaches. Azerbaijan’s Aliyev, with his two-decade relationship with the Russian president, seems most comfortable with Putin’s way of doing business. He can also derive confidence from the strong personal and institutional support he gets from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the case of Georgia, with which Russia has no diplomatic relations, there are no face-to-face meetings or structured talks. (If Georgia’s de facto leader, Ivanishvili, ever met Putin, it would have been in the 1990s long before either man was a big political player.) Once again, everything is highly informal and conducted by middlemen. Here, too, business stands at the heart of a mutually beneficial relationship. Paradoxically, the one country in the region that has long-standing formal and institutional links to Russia—Armenia—is also keenest to break off the relationship.

Speculation has mounted about what Russia may be planning for Abkhazia.

All these variables make Russian behavior in the region, as elsewhere, highly unpredictable. Since Azerbaijan’s capture of Nagorno-Karabakh, speculation has mounted as to what could happen in Abkhazia, the breakaway territory bordering Russia in the northwest corner of Georgia that has been a zone of conflict since the 1990s. Could Russia move to annex it fully, thus securing a new naval base on the Black Sea? Or—as some recent rumors have suggested—could a deal similar to the one with Azerbaijan be in the offing, whereby Moscow allows Georgia to march into Abkhazia unopposed in return for Georgia renouncing its Euro-Atlantic ambitions? Either of these is theoretically possible—though it is also quite likely that Putin prefers the status quo and will continue to focus on Ukraine.

At the same time, the most obvious benefit the South Caucasus countries have derived from the post-2022 situation—a stronger economic relationship with Russia—is unstable. Close trading ties to Russia give Moscow dangerous leverage, especially in the case of Armenia and Georgia, which have fewer resources and other places to turn for support. And if Western secondary sanctions on businesses that trade with Russia are tightened, that would put a squeeze on South Caucasian intermediaries.

Not everything is going Putin’s way. Russia’s military withdrawal from Azerbaijan is a sign of weakness. So, too, arguably, is Armenia’s pivot to the West and the Georgian public’s mass resistance to what the opposition labels the “Russian law.” But if Russia looks weaker in the region, the West does not look stronger. There are significant pro-European social dynamics at work, but they face strong competition from political and economic forces that are pulling the South Caucasus in very different directions.

Last month, the Georgian government awarded the tender to develop a new deep-water port on the Black Sea at Anaklia to a controversial Chinese company. That project used to be managed by a U.S.-led consortium. In other words, Europe and the United States are competing for influence not just with Russia but also with other powers, as well. Nothing can be taken for granted in a region that is as volatile as it has ever been.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/azerbaijan/putins-hidden-game-south-caucasus