Russia’s Nagorno-Karabakh conflict plan poses renewed Armenia-Azerbaijan war risks

Key Points

• Russia is likely to increase pressure on Armenia to surrender some of the occupied districts to Azerbaijan.
• If the Armenian government refuses, Azerbaijan would probably be less constrained by Russia from launching another military campaign to change the status quo by military means. Russian peacekeepers would probably then be deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh.
• Armenian acceptance would be met by mass unrest and even an internal armed uprising, with Azerbaijan potentially taking advance of the chaos to launch an offensive into Nagorno-Karabakh.

EVENT

On 8-10 August 2016, Russian president Vladimir Putin will hold a series of meetings with the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey, which are probably aimed at asserting Russian interests around the 28-year dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Putin’s shuttle diplomacy

On 8-10 August, Russia will be engaged in high-level diplomacy with four countries affected by the unresolved conflict over the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh region, which broke away from Azerbaijan in 1988. This led to a six-year war, with an uneasy ceasefire since 1994 punctuated by frequent exchanges of artillery, small arms fire and even the downing of aircraft. On 8 August, President Vladimir Putin will be attending the first trilateral presidential summit between Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia in Baku. The meeting will primarily focus on energy and transportation projects, but it is also most likely to include discussion of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. On 9 August, Putin will host Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in St Petersburg, in a show of reconciliation after a major deterioration in bilateral relations when Turkey shot down a Russian military aircraft in late 2015. Finally, on 10 August, Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan will travel to Moscow.

IHS Markit assesses that this sequence of visits indicates that Russia is probably ironing out the details of a peace deal which, importantly for the Kremlin, include the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in the region.

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Alex Kokcharov and Alex Melikishvili and Lilit Gevorgyan – IHS Jane’s Intelligence Weekly