Recently, Azerbaijan has been successful to take strongly unprecedented measures in order to restore its full sovereignty in Qarabag territory. In spite the fact that Russia had always made an attempts to play balanced role and maintain status que, recently it would rather exercise noninterventionist policy in south Caucasus which has led to pave way for fully military operations and so sovereignty reviving of republic of Azerbaijan, so the reasons of this position is going to be elucidated below.
Initially, since Pashiniyan came to power in 2018, west-oriented axis of Armenian foreign policy has dramatically been intensified and some crucial political and economic positions have drastically been assigned to anti-Russian thinkers. On the other word, the circles of elites who give consultations to the president in political structure of this country have increased, so the relations of two countries have negatively been impressed. In this regard, the Rome Statute was lately ratified by the Armenian parliament. On the eve of its ratification, the spokesman of RF, President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, had said that they would consider it as an extremely hostile move towards them.
In addition, geopolitical and geoeconomic importance of Armenia have instantly been downgraded from Russian policy makers perspective due to the fact that this country has not been involved in critical regional and extra regional projects over the three decades ago and its role has been converted to a marginalized country in the recent regional political and geo economic configurations. Unlike this country, Azerbaijan owing to increasing geo economic role has been attached significances by both Russian and western policy makers. Consequently, this led to superiority of Azerbaijan in their strategic calculations of cost-benefit of regional developments. Indeed, boosting Azerbaijani strength not only has extremely brought about changes in regional balance of power, but also led to transformations of regional country’s attitudes towards that.
Furthermore, the consequences of Ukraine war mitigating Russian monopolistic and hegemonic positions in Caucasus have created the vacuums in the region which are being filled by the new extra regional countries including Turkey and China. These countries are striving to build strategic depth through carrying out a variety of projects in different fields. In this regard, Azerbaijan and Turkey recently agreed to establish railway and energy pipeline from Igdir to Naxchivan at expense of weakening Iran’s national interests. Additionally, china and Azerbaijan signed an agreement to expand their technical and transport cooperation which can result in carrying out Zangazur road and railway in coming years.
Finally, increasing highly constructive role of Turkey which has been provided through adopting balanced policy between west and east, alongside the pragmatic policy of Azerbaijan are included among other crucial factors that have provoked Russia to keep silent rather than play deterministic role. As matter of fact, Russia gives some concessions to some regional and extra regional players, so that it can use these countries’ capabilities to simultaneously circumvent and mitigate west countries sanctions.
In conclusion, a great number of impressive factors including intensifying west orientation of Armenia, weakening regional geopolitical and geo economic position of Armenia over the past 3 decades, the repercussions of Ukraine war and boosting regional power of turkey have unprecedentedly made Russia to exercise neutral policy rather than interventionist policy. Nevertheless, the new regional trends including the complete evacuations of Armenian people from Qarabag, which make meaningless the military presence of Russia in deputed areas, and possible political and diplomatic normalizations of Armenia with both historical enemies, which can lead to intensify currently exercised west oriented policy of Armenia, can bring about changes in currently adopted regional policy of Russia.
