All interested parties received Moscow’s opinion directly from the subdivision of the Russian Foreign Ministry directly dealing with the “Karabakh settlement”.
Gonchar believes that “by virtue of its geographical location, historical past, the scope and nature of its ties, Russia cannot and should not stay away from solving the problems of the Transcaucasus.” Therefore, its “vested interest was and is to establish lasting peace and stability in the region”. We had the chance to see firsthand what efforts in this direction have been made by Moscow over the past 30 years, until the Azerbaijani army made a decisive contribution to speeding up progress towards establishing stability in the region in the fall of 2020.
The Russian diplomat expressed concern about the “very complicated situation” in the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping forces and said he hoped that “humanitarian considerations and concern for the ordinary people will outweigh the political differences between Baku and Yerevan.” Thus, the responsibility for the current situation was placed on Baku and Yerevan, rather than on the destructive stance of the separatist regime existing in the territory of Azerbaijan controlled by Russian peacekeepers.
Moscow is concerned that a peace treaty may be signed not under its umbrella and not on the terms it proposes. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova keeps reiterating this, and now the director of a Foreign Ministry department has also mentioned it.
Indeed, optimistic statements are being voiced in Brussels and Washington: a peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia may be signed very soon. President Ilham Aliyev is more cautious in his forecasts and expects the signing to happen by the end of the year. This has probably caused concern in Moscow, and now Gonchar urges the parties not to rush, to think twice about what they intend to sign. Somehow, he is certain that the text of the agreement being discussed in Western capitals is bound to lead to future conflicts: “A hastily drafted, raw peace treaty will not bring sustainable peace to the region. On the contrary, it will lay the groundwork for new conflicts and tragedies in the future. Priority should be given not to speed, but to quality preparation of balanced and mutually acceptable solutions,” the diplomat believes. In other words, the Russian Foreign Ministry has decided to grant itself the right to decide for Azerbaijan and Armenia which document is “raw” and improperly drafted, and which, in its opinion, is high quality and ready for use.
The Russian Foreign Ministry sees rushing the signing of the treaty as irresponsible, citing “opportunistic considerations”, and suggests basing it primarily on the trilateral Azerbaijan-Armenia-Russia statement of 09.11.2020. The trilateral statement, as we know, was signed for the purposes of ceasefire and the deployment of a Russian peacekeeping contingent in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan; it is of a temporary nature and cannot be the basis for a comprehensive peace.
The Russian diplomat is convinced that in order for the peace agreement to be sustainable, it is essential to ensure “the universally recognized rights of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh”. For this purpose, he believes, “a mechanism of international support for the implementation of the agreement” within the framework of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity should be activated. D. Gonchar does not specify what he means by an “international mechanism”, but it is obvious that it implies continued presence of the Russian peacekeeping forces in the territory of Azerbaijan after the signing of the Azerbaijan-Armenia peace treaty. And this obviously entails preserving the current status quo: the isolation of this part of the Karabakh region from the legal framework of Azerbaijan. According to available information, the text of the peace treaty being promoted at the meetings in Moscow includes an article on a special status for the Armenian-populated part of Karabakh, the observance of which is to be ensured by Russian peacekeeping forces.
This approach is unacceptable for Azerbaijan, as President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly stated, and therefore negotiations on this basis are doomed to failure. Everyone knows this, which means that once again we are being encouraged to get sucked into an endless negotiation process to preserve the current status quo. There are reasons to believe that this policy on the Karabakh issue was adopted by the Kremlin when the trilateral statement was signed. On October 17, 2020, a week after the signing, expounding his view on the problem, President Vladimir Putin said that the issue of Karabakh’s future status would be decided by future generations: “The issue of the final status of Karabakh has not been resolved. We have agreed that we will maintain the status quo, the current status quo. What will happen next is to be decided in the future or by future leaders, future participants in this process.” According to the Kremlin, the resolution of the Karabakh problem is a matter of the indefinite future—”if there are conditions for normal life, for the restoration of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, between people on the everyday level, especially in the conflict zone, this will create conditions for determining the status of Karabakh.”
This position, of course, completely suits Yerevan. We can see that all of Nikol Pashinyan’s activity in this area is aimed at absolving himself of responsibility for what is happening in Karabakh, shifting it to external players, while he himself, unencumbered by this uncomfortable burden, leads his country in the direction set by him. The separatist regime in Khankendi dreams about this resolution of the situation and keeps declaring the necessity of prolonging the period of the Russian peacekeepers’ stay in Karabakh. The separatists continue to escalate the situation, intent on showing just how “unprotected” and “in need of protection” they are.
We can see that the situation tends to aggravate as 2025 approaches. And the statements coming from Moscow can hardly serve the stated goal: the establishment of a lasting peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Eldar Ginesli
Translated from Minval.az
