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 Azerbaijani military’s use of Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), purchased from Turkey, played such a prominent role in Baku’s victory over Armenian forces during the Second Karabakh War (September 27–November 9, 2020) that defense analysts around the world are now focusing on how... 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. Russian troops deployed to Upper (“Nagorno”) Karabakh exceed by far the number stipulated in the November 9 armistice agreement (see EDM, November 12, 13) due to the additional deployment of Russia’s Humanitarian Response Center personnel. This supplementary manpower... MORE

Last September, the Russian Dossier Center investigative project, funded by opposition leader and former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, published a controversial report on the country’s “soft power” policies toward the South Caucasus based on leaks from the Kremlin and Russian special services. The study reveals... MORE

Following its victorious 44-day war (September 27–November 9), Azerbaijan controls approximately one third of the territory of its Upper (“Nagorno”) Karabakh region. The larger part remains under Armenia’s control via the unrecognized republic of Karabakh, although the territory is universally recognized as being a part... MORE

On November 24, the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs strictly condemned Sukhumi and Moscow’s joint approval of a program to create a common socio-economic space uniting breakaway Abkhazia and Russia. Tbilisi slammed it as “another illegal step toward the de facto annexation” of its occupied... MORE