How the war in Ukraine is changing the Caucasus

By Arkady Ostrovsky

Compared with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the horrors of Hamas’s attack on Israel and the ensuing conflict, the one-day war waged in September 2023 by Azerbaijan against its ethnic-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh may seem like a blip. This final episode in a long cycle of violence between Azerbaijan and Armenia gave Azerbaijan control of a region that has wished to be separate from it since before the Soviet collapse, and prompted the exodus of most of the Armenian population.

But this short war is part of a huge shift that has changed the balance of power in the former Soviet Union and in the world, and that will continue well into 2024. Nagorno-Karabakh played a key role both in the composition of the Soviet Union and in its decomposition. Now it marks what could be the last spasm of the system which has kept the Caucasus, one way or another, connected to Moscow.