Month: September 2023

Karabakh Armenians face a very uncertain future in Azerbaijan. UK journalist Thomas de Waal, who is also a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region as well as an expert on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, told this to The Guardian.

“A ceasefire is positive, obviously, if it lasts, as the threat of mass bloodshed will be averted,” he wrote in an email. “What we are seeing here is the intervention of Russia on behalf of Azerbaijan to keep its peacekeeping force in Karabakh at least for the time being and thereby a foothold in the South Caucasus.”

“The main losers are the Karabakh Armenians who have lost their 35-year-old struggle for self-determination or secession from Azerbaijan. They now lose any means of self-defence and face a very uncertain future in Azerbaijan. The Karabakhis may have avoided complete destruction but they are more likely facing a slow-motion removal from their homeland, as Azerbaijan is not offering them any autonomy or special political rights,” de Waal added.

The other losers, he said, “are the European Union and the United States, which have tried hard to be mediators in this conflict but whose message of rights and international guarantees is being drowned out by the tougher messages of Azerbaijan and Russia.”

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YEREVAN, Sept 20 (Reuters) – Here are some key facts about Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who finds himself at the centre of a new crisis after Azerbaijan launched an offensive this week in the breakaway Armenian-populated territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

– Pashinyan, 48, is a former journalist who became prime minister after a wave of street protests, sometimes referred to as Armenia’s Velvet Revolution, toppled his predecessor in 2018. On taking power, he promised to revamp the economy and fight corruption, earning strong popular support.

– Pashinyan came under heavy domestic pressure in 2020 after agreeing to a Russian-brokered ceasefire that ended a 44-day war between ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan scored a comprehensive victory, recapturing a third of the breakaway territory as well as seven surrounding districts. Pashinyan faced calls to resign, as angry crowds protested in the capital Yerevan.

– Pashinyan has engaged in successive rounds of talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in search of a peace agreement between two countries. Earlier this year he made an important shift by recognising that Nagorno-Karabakh was part of Azerbaijan, thereby giving up any claim on it by Yerevan. But Azerbaijan rejected his demand for it to agree to protect the rights and security of Karabakh Armenians.

– Pashinyan’s relations with his main ally, Russia, have sharply worsened in recent months. He said that Moscow had not fulfilled its duties as a peacekeeper in Nagorno-Karabakh and took a series of steps that angered Russia. These included Armenia’s moves towards membership of the International Criminal Court – which has accused President Vladimir Putin of war crimes in Ukraine – and its hosting of a peacekeeping exercise with U.S. soldiers this month.

– Pashinyan said in an address to the nation on Tuesday that Azerbaijan’s new offensive in Karabakh was the start of “a specific operation of ethnic cleansing” and that Armenia would resist what he called attempts to draw it into a military escalation.

– Pashinyan is likely to come under fierce domestic pressure again if Azerbaijan takes back control of Nagorno-Karabakh. In his speech on Tuesday, he said that “calls for a coup d’etat are already being heard”, but did not present any evidence of an attempt to remove him.

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The Kremlin and its agents have many explanations and justifications for the invasion of Ukraine. 

Those depend on the target audience: when they address the far-left, they swear by anti-colonialism. When they talk to the far-right, they speak about “wokeism” and traditional values. 

When they turn to Europeans, they claim the US is exploiting the continent and that Washington provoked the war. When they move to the Middle East, they speak about the invasion of Iraq and the “Western Crusades”. 

When they look at Africa, they pretend that Russia did not colonise swaths of the Asian continent.

The list goes on. 

The fact of the matter is the Kremlin is not driven by any official ideology. It adheres to no principles whatsoever, and it is more akin to a highwayman changing his garb at will if it means getting to the loot more easily.

Delusions of grandeur while slaughtering victims

Thus, the big question is: is it all for show? Are there absolutely no beliefs in the Kremlin’s decision-making circles, and are they then motivated exclusively by self-interest? 

Or rather, did Russia’s Vladimir Putin start the invasion because he is a neocolonialist rebuilding the empire or because he is a corrupt autocrat who wants to prolong his stay in power either by a quick military victory or a never-ending war? 

One of the answers certainly can be, “why not both?”

Corruption and imperialism can co-exist in the same person’s set of beliefs. After all, the said road bandit can also delusionally picture himself as a knight in shining armour while robbing and slaughtering his victims. 

Putin can build his own castles in the sand and still promote the theory of the “degradation of the West” that’s been around for at least seventy years or so. 

But, more important than its beliefs is how the Kremlin is using ideology in a fractured postmodern world to its advantage. And worryingly, Putin has increasingly allowed Nazism to seep in and take hold.

How close are Russian far-right figures to true Nazism?

The Kremlin’s favourite argument for the Western audience, besides blaming the US for Russia’s invasion, revolves around the alleged “Ukrainian Nazis” that are pulling all the strings in Kyiv. 

It’s not that Ukraine doesn’t have its share of far-right supporters. It’s the fact that the far right has a negligible influence on Ukraine’s political scene.

Russia, on the other hand, has nurtured imperialist far-right ideas for decades. Growingly, these feature all the textbook signs of Nazism — the disdain for liberal democracy, the outright hatred of others, scientific racism, and calls for the eradication of entire groups in particular.

In some, far-right ideas in Russia are a mixture of Nazism and Stalinism, as witnessed in former Duma member Zakhar Prilepin’s National-Bolsheviks. 

Others only thinly veil their extremism in traditional Orthodox Russian imperialism, exemplified by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) leadership and former paramilitary commander Igor Strelkov aka Girkin.

The now-infamous Konstantin Malofeev and Yegor Kholmogorov from the far-right Tsargrad TV also belong in this niche.

The version of Eurasianism pushed by self-proclaimed political philosopher and strategist Aleksandr Dugin represents a mix and rehashing of concepts from proto-fascist Russian thinkers from the turn of the 20th century. 

Besides them, there are the ultra-patriots, the official far-right, centred in the LDPR party, once led by notorious extremist political provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Just Russia party, headed by Sergey Milonov, both of which are in the Duma. 

Finally, there are actual neo-pagan ethnonationalists believing in the “pure Slavic race” who are, in essence, neo-Nazis (like the Rusich battalion waging war for Russia in Ukraine).

Fringe became mainstream, all thanks to Putin

What’s drastically changed since the invasion is that the far-right is rapidly becoming mainstream in Russia.

Once a poster boy for a would-be liberal Russia and the country’s toothless president, Dmitry Medvedev now writes mammoth social media posts about “unterukraine” and “Big Great Russia”, using Nazi vocabulary. 

On the federal Russian Orthodox TV channel Spas, or “Salvation”, Yevgeny Nikiforov, the editor-in-chief of yet another Russian Orthodox outlet, Radio Radonezh, often parrots lines such as that “the disease, which has taken hold in Ukraine, should be cleansed by fire”.

Igor Fomin, a highly ranked cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church — bearer of three ROC medals with a parish on the grounds of Moscow’s MGIMO university, which is mostly attended by the progeny of Russia’s new elites — compares the war Russia is waging in Ukraine with the Old Testament and presents the hierarchy he believes in as “Nation, President, God”. 

The Almighty, apparently, has to settle for the bronze medal. 

He then goes on to say that Putin is doing God’s work in Ukraine like Joshua — the Biblical character famously tasked with wiping the “wicked nations” from the face of the Earth — did with the Canaanites. 

Many such statements are now regularly broadcast on Russian federal media, be it state or “private” (although there can’t be any private media in Putin’s wannabe-totalitarian system).

Anything goes, just to justify the war

Before the invasion, the Russian far-right was mostly marginalised on the fringes of society. They had ties with the Kremlin or the security circles — especially in the FSB and the army — but they did not reach large audiences.

The ultra-patriot group was always in plain sight, but they were not there to represent the policies of the government. Rather, their task was always to sound more radical, reckless and dangerous than Putin in his “spin dictator” phase, as economist Sergei Guriev neatly summarised it. 

Even when the Kremlin launched its unsuccessful “Novorossiya” project in 2014, the Russian extremists from the Donbas, posing as military correspondents or journalists, were not a part of everyday Russian society. 

They were officially treated by the regime as an allied neighbouring force fending off the “evil West and Banderites” and kept at a distance, a perk of plausible deniability.

With the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s need to justify the war grew to embrace everyone, including the most psychotic among the commentariat, as the entire narrative was organised around normalising the aggression.

In turn, now even the most radical nutjobs have become a part of the norm. 

Russia is at a stage where it will need to undergo denazification

All of these far-right theories, some of which portray Russia as a force handpicked by God to postpone the Apocalypse — one of the non-standard Russian Orthodox teachings rehashed by Dugin, known as the Katekhon — or Russia as the righteous empire in a struggle against the “fallen” Western democracies, were in circulation, but they were not presented by the state as the norm on a daily basis like they are today. 

The Russian people can turn off their TV sets, as the research shows they are doing, but these narratives aren’t going away. 

They have entrenched themselves in the Russian political and social discourse. 

And now, we have come to the point where we can justifiably claim that the damage done by Putin’s mafia regime has led to a glaring Nazification of Russia.

Therefore, in the near future, Russian society will have to undergo a painful process of denazifying itself — that is, if it ever wants to be trusted as a progressive part of the continent and a good neighbour to the countries it tried to oppress.

Aleksandar Đokić is a Serbian political scientist and analyst with bylines in Novaya Gazeta. He was formerly a lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow.

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The roughly 85 U.S. soldiers deployed to Armenia for a military exercise are not currently facing any threats from the fighting that erupted on Tuesday over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, defense officials said.

The soldiers have been training alongside 175 Armenian troops as part of the Eagle Partner peacekeeping training exercise, which began on Sept. 11.

On Tuesday, Azerbaijan launched a military operation against Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but has been ruled by an ethnic Armenian government since 1994.

Despite the renewed fighting in the region, the U.S. soldiers in Armenia will not leave the country earlier than expected, said Army Col. Martin O’Donnell, a spokesman for U.S. Army Europe.

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Those soldiers will return to their units in Europe and the United States after the exercise ends as scheduled on Wednesday, O’Donnell told Task & Purpose.

Soldiers from the Kansas National Guard and 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Task Force Mountain hold an opening day ceremony for Eagle Partner 2023 Sept. 15, 2023 in a training area in Armenia. (Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Duncan/U.S. Army)

“We are aware of reports that Azerbaijan is conducting operations near the border of Armenia,” O’Donnell said on Tuesday. “We do not assess there to be any risk to our Soldiers at this time and they will remain in place for the duration of the exercise.”

With the Eagle Partner exercise, a handful of U.S. troops sit on Russia’s doorstep at a time when relations between Washington and Moscow are at their lowest point since the Cold War.  Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has committed to providing Ukraine with more than $43 billion in military assistance.

But the U.S. military has long standing connections with Armenia that predate the war in Ukraine. The Kansas National Guard has had a state partnership with Armenia since 2003 as part of the Department of Defense’s State Partnership Program.

Army Maj. Gregory Anderson, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, recently described the U.S. military’s ties with Armenia as “multifaceted and cooperative,” according to a Sept. 15 news release from the U.S.  Embassy in Armenia.

Soldiers from the Kansas National Guard and 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Task Force Mountain hold an opening day ceremony for Eagle Partner 2023 Sept. 11, 2023 in a training area in Armenia.(Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Duncan/U.S. Army)

Anderson came to Armenia to observe Eagle Partner along with Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Ellis, deputy chief of staff for operations with U.S. Army Europe and Africa, the news release says.

“The U.S. has consistently extended military assistance to Armenia, especially in bolstering the nation’s capabilities in crucial areas such as nonproliferation and peacekeeping,” Anderson said during his visit.

The soldiers taking part in Eagle Partner come from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division; Kansas Army National Guard; 4th Security Forces Assistance Brigade; 7th Army Training Command; and 21st Theater Sustainment Command, O’Donnell said. They have been training near Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.

“Eagle Partner is designed to enhance interoperability for peacekeeping operations with Armenia and prepare the Armenian 12th Peacekeeping Brigade for NATO Operational Capability Concept Evaluation and Feedback Programme evaluations later this year,” O’Donnell said.

The violence that broke out on Tuesday is the latest clash in a 35-year-old battle. Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a bloody war over the Nagorno-Karabakh from 1988 to 1994 that left Armenians in full control of the enclave.

The two countries fought again in 2020, and Azerbaijan emerged victorious after a six-week war in which it successfully used drones to destroy Armenian tanks. Azerbaijan took control of several districts in the disputed territory.

The 2020 war ended with an agreement brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, under which his country committed 2,000 troops to serve as peacekeepers. Since then, Russia has committed the majority of its military to its invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. military planners are closely watching the current conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh to see how the situation develops, a defense official said.