Paul Robinson: Renewed Azerbaijan/Armenia Conflict a New Threat to Russia’s Delicate Balancing Act with Key Player Turkey

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By Professor Paul Robinson, RT, 9/28/20

Azerbaijan has never forgotten its 1990s humiliation at the hands of Armenia. Now stronger than its sworn enemy, and emboldened by Turkish support, Baku’s assertiveness is creating a headache for Moscow.

Russian president Vladimir Putin once complained that communist leader Vladimir Lenin had placed a ‘time bomb’ under Russia. He had in mind the introduction of the federal principle after Lenin’s Bolsheviks took power in 1917. Lenin gave national minorities their own republics within the Soviet Union. In so doing, he created a situation which allowed those republics to secede from the Union once communist power collapsed.

Soviet federalism brought other problems. The communists granted autonomy to the larger nationalities in the form of 15 ‘republics.’ Smaller nationalities also got autonomy, but of a different form – so-called ‘autonomous republics’ and ‘autonomous regions.’ When the union fell apart, fully-fledged republics got independence, but the autonomous republics and regions within them did not.

Unsurprisingly, many of the smaller minorities were not too happy with this somewhat arbitrary outcome, and attempted to secede from the seceding republics. The result was several wars, the first of which took place in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, after it attempted to secede from Azerbaijan and join with Armenia. The war ended in an Armenian victory. Not only did the Armenians drive the Azeris out of Nagorno-Karabakh, but they also captured a swath of Azeri territory linking Armenia with the breakaway region.

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2 thoughts on “Paul Robinson: Renewed Azerbaijan/Armenia Conflict a New Threat to Russia’s Delicate Balancing Act with Key Player Turkey”

  1. The American government should support Armenia/Artsakh for two obvious and indisputable reasons:
    1. Armenia/Artsakh are democratic republics, like U.S.. Both Turkey and its vessel state, Azerbaijan, are theocratically authoritarian imperialistic complex.
    2. We do not want to getting into a wrongful nuclear confrontation between Russia and NATO, at a wrong place and a wrong time, when we are busy dealing with the Chinese imperialistic aggression in the West Pacific.

  2. An article to share with everybody interested in the conflict of Nagorno-Karabakh:
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/04/self-determination-in-nagorno-karabakh
    It has been too often in history when a small ethnic group were engaging in a life-or-death fight for their self-determination, the empires were just looking over the map as a chessboard.
    However, the American people should always remember that over 200 years ago, our founding fathers were also engaging in a life-or-death fight for not only their self-determination, but also ours.

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