The Kremlin Is Losing A Decisive Battle

Russia will certainly withdraw from the South Caucasus.

June 7 may be one of the most important days for the future of what is left of the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin turned a seemingly trivial parliamentary election in Armenia into a real battle - with threats, a ban on food, and the landing of Russian residents with Armenian passports to support the party of a Russian businessman without an Armenian passport. It's a total mess - but that's how Putin always does it!

But if you look closely at the historical context, it becomes obvious how important control over the South Caucasus is to the Kremlin's master. It is somehow erased from our memory that the events in the Soviet Union, if we talk about social movements in the Union republics, actually started not from Lithuania, but from Armenia. With the "Karabakh" committee. And here is what is important: the KGB gladly used the mood prevailing in the society at that time, the feeling of injustice due to the fact that the territory with Armenian majority is within Azerbaijan and that someone from outside wants to change the territory of Azerbaijan in order to literally push the peoples against each other and thus build an ideal trap for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians - and also to contribute to the destabilization of the situation in the Soviet Union and to demonstrate the inefficiency and helplessness of the party leadership. Moreover - when Azerbaijan's new president Heydar Aliyev, himself a former chairman of the Azerbaijan SSR's KGB, attempted to break away and negotiate with his Armenian counterpart Levon Ter-Petrosian, former chairman of the Karabakh Committee, the Kremlin organized a military coup in Armenia and handed power to its protégé and former president of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Robert Kocharyan. In fact, what happened in Armenia then was what happened in Ukraine in 1994 - only Kocharyan was not Kuchma, but rather Medvedchuk.

But not Yanukovych. If we continue these parallels - Yanukovych was Kocharyan's successor Serzh Sargsyan, who tried to be friends with Moscow, but at the same time get money from the West. Putin almost simultaneously got both Sargsyan and Yanukovych to reject the Association Agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych lost power over the next few months. Armenian society was not so impressed by the rejection of the European association. But deprived of room for maneuver, Sarkisian increasingly turned into a petty provincial dictator - and lost power four years after Yanukovych in a genuine revolution. One could say that in Armenia, the "Zelensky effect" then worked a year before Zelensky - because of all post-Soviet leaders, Zelensky is most similar in type and style to former journalist Nikol Pashinyan.

It is true that Putin in this situation remained Putin unchanged. The Russian dictator began to take revenge on the Armenians just as he had previously taken revenge on the Ukrainians, and took an ostensibly emphasized neutral stance in the second Karabakh war, which doomed an Armenia plundered by two pro-Russian regimes to defeat. But, as in the case of Ukraine, Putin's revenge has had the opposite effect - it has opened Armenians' eyes to Russia just as it opened them to Ukrainians. Even those Armenians who believe that ties with Moscow should be maintained advocate this idea not out of love, but out of desperation and fear of their neighbors. And Pashinyan, who has not yet quarreled with Putin definitively, but is already looking for other friends and creating conditions for peace (albeit tepid) with recent enemies, looks to many like a paragon of common sense.

That is why the Kremlin is now waging a battle in Armenia that is doomed to defeat. The main element of its blackmail was not Jermuk water or Armenian cognac, but control over Karabakh, which has been finally restored by Azerbaijan. Yes, at the cost of the tragedy of thousands of people forced to flee their homeland - but the Russians have been doing everything possible for decades to bring the matter to just such a disaster.

If Moscow loses control over Armenia (and it will), it will also lose control over the Caucasus. The Bolsheviks returned to this region a hundred years ago for a reason: they wanted not just to keep Armenians, Azeris and Georgians in their hands, but also to blackmail Turkey and Iran, later even partially occupied by the Soviet Union, if possible. It was not by chance that Moscow started destabilizing the Caucasus in the 1990s and inciting the nations. It needed to make Russia - the main destabilizer of the region - appear to be the main "stabilizer" here. Not to mention the blatant disregard with which the self-proclaimed colonizers treated the ancient great civilizations - it is a mystery to me how Armenians or Georgians could tolerate all this for centuries: either hopelessness or some kind of hypnosis.

But now the trap is almost broken. Russia will definitely leave the South Caucasus - this time for good. And I really hope that in the future we will be thanked for this.

Because if not for the Ukrainian resistance, there is no telling how many years Russia would have had the Caucasus by the throat.

Vitaly Portnikov, Facebook

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