The drastically upended situation along the southern edge of the South Caucasus has affected Iran in several complex ways. Among the three large powers surrounding the region—Iran, Russia and Turkey—only Iran borders on the formerly Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territories of Zangilan, Jabrayil and Fuzuli, which adjoin... MORE

In the wake of Azerbaijan’s successful offensive against the dug-in Armenian forces in Karabakh and surrounding Azerbaijani districts, the defense ministers of Turkey and Russia, General (ret.) Hulusi Akar and General Sergei Shoigu, respectively, met on November 11 and penned a memorandum of understanding to... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently supplanted the Minsk Group’s triple co-chairmanship (the United States, France, Russia) as mediator between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It was Putin, not the Minsk co-chairmanship, who... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Azerbaijan’s successful military action against Armenia’s occupying forces in Karabakh this autumn disproved Western diplomacy’s admonitions about post-Soviet “frozen conflicts” having “no military solutions” but “only political, negotiated solutions” with “no alternatives.” Armenia, however, had imposed its own... MORE

The Second Karabakh War (September 27–November 9, 2020) has resulted in an Azerbaijani national triumph, a self-inflicted Armenian trauma, geopolitical gains for Russia, another debacle of Western diplomacy, and Turkey’s reassertion as a regional power in the South Caucasus. The significance of Azerbaijan’s military victory... MORE

On November 11, a day after he signed the trilateral accord with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan ending the Second Karabakh War, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan declared that “almost 99 percent of the liberated territories had been destroyed” (Azernews,... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. *To read Part Three, please click here.   Over the past two decades, the main international mechanism for resolving the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh—the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the issue at stake, mediators are expected to be impartial between two parties to a conflict. Yet the Minsk Group’s co-chairing Western governments—those of... MORE

The November 10 declaration that instituted a ceasefire between Azerbaijan and Armenia also established new east-west and north-south transportation corridors across this corner of the South Caucasus, thus complicating and intensifying the “railway wars” that have gripped the region at various periods since the turn... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. The second Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan (September–November 2020) has conclusively discredited the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group, the instrument of multilateral diplomacy mandated 28 years ago to mediate a solution to... MORE