June 7th could be one of the most important days for the future of what remains of the post-Soviet space. The seemingly trivial parliamentary elections in Armenia were turned by the Kremlin into a real battle—with threats, product bans, and the deployment of Russian residents with Armenian passports to support the party of a Russian businessman without an Armenian passport. Complete chaos—but that’s always how it is with Putin!
However, if you look closely at the historical context, it’s clear how important control over the South Caucasus is for the Kremlin’s master. We’ve somehow forgotten that the events in the Soviet Union, speaking of public movements in the union republics, actually started not with Lithuania but with Armenia. With the “Karabakh” Committee. And here’s what’s important: the KGB gladly exploited the prevailing societal sentiments, the sense of injustice due to the territory with an Armenian majority being part of Azerbaijan, and that someone from outside wanted to change Azerbaijan’s territory to literally pit the peoples against each other, thus creating an ideal trap for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians, while also destabilizing the situation in the Soviet Union and demonstrating the inefficiency and helplessness of the party leadership.
When the communist empire finally collapsed and people from the KGB (now the FSB) began to ascend to power in Russia, the doors of the Caucasian trap remained firmly closed. Moreover, when the new President of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, himself a former head of the KGB of the Azerbaijani SSR, attempted to break free and negotiate with his Armenian counterpart Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the former head of the “Karabakh” Committee, the Kremlin organized a military coup in Armenia and handed power to its protégé and former president of the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Robert Kocharyan. Essentially, what happened in Armenia was what happened in Ukraine in 1994, only Kocharyan was not Kuchma but rather immediately Medvedchuk. But not Yanukovych.
Continuing these parallels, Yanukovych was Kocharyan’s successor Serzh Sargsyan, who tried to be friendly with Moscow while simultaneously receiving money from the West. Putin practically simultaneously achieved from both Sargsyan and Yanukovych the rejection of the Association Agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych lost power within the next few months. For Armenian society, the rejection of European association did not have the same impact. However, deprived of maneuverability, Sargsyan increasingly turned into a petty provincial dictator and lost power four years after Yanukovych as a result of a true revolution. It can be said that in Armenia, the “Zelensky effect” worked a year before Zelensky, because of all the post-Soviet leaders, Zelensky in type and style is most similar to the former journalist Nikol Pashinyan.
However, in this situation, Putin remained unchanged. The Russian dictator began to take revenge on the Armenians as he previously did on the Ukrainians, adopting an ostensibly neutral stance in the second Karabakh war, which doomed Armenia, plundered by two pro-Russian regimes, to defeat. But, as in the case with Ukraine, Putin’s revenge led to the opposite result—it opened Armenians’ eyes to Russia as it opened Ukrainians’. Even those Armenians who believe that ties with Moscow should be maintained support this idea not out of love, but out of hopelessness and fear of neighbors. And Pashinyan, who hasn’t yet quarreled with Putin entirely but is already seeking other friends and creating conditions for peace (albeit a cool one) with recent enemies, appears to many as a model of common sense.
Therefore, the Kremlin is today fighting a battle in Armenia that is doomed to failure. The main element of its blackmail was not Jermuk water nor Armenian brandy, but control over Karabakh, which has been fully restored by Azerbaijan. Yes, through the tragedy of thousands of people forced to leave their homes, but the Russians have done everything possible for decades to bring about precisely such a tragedy.
If Moscow loses control over Armenia (and it will), it will also lose control over the Caucasus. The Bolsheviks did not return to this region a hundred years ago for no reason: they wanted not just to keep the Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians in hand, but also, if possible, to blackmail Turkey and Iran, later even partially occupied by the Soviet Union. Moscow did not begin destabilizing the Caucasus in the 1990s by accident, inciting nations. It needed Russia—the main destabilizer of this region—to appear here as the main “stabilizer.” Not to mention the undisguised disdain with which self-appointed colonizers regarded ancient great civilizations—it’s a mystery to me how Armenians or Georgians could endure all this for centuries: either hopelessness or some kind of hypnosis.
But now the trap is almost destroyed. Russia will inevitably leave the South Caucasus—this time for good. And I very much hope that in the future we’ll be thanked for it.
Because if not for the Ukrainian resistance, it’s unknown how many more years Russia would have held the Caucasus by the throat.
Photo: Wikipedia
