Nominally, Azerbaijan is allied with Russia and Turkey, but in practice, Baku will likely move to strengthen its ties with Ankara, even as Moscow remains a major trading partner.

It wasn’t so long ago that Azerbaijan was a focus of global attention, the country a rare feature of international headlines after a simmering dispute with neighbouring Armenia over control of Nagorno-Karabakh turned violent.

Thirty years ago this month as western capitals toasted Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, eternal peace and the apparent triumph of liberalism, the Times of London published the first eyewitness account of a tragedy at Khojaly, Azerbaijan — where advancing Armenian forces had accelerated their war in the weeks immediately after the Soviet Union’s fall.

The three countries of the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) are holding a vigilant and mostly balanced stance amidst the Russia-Ukraine war.

On February 22, just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of the Ukrainian separatist areas of Donetsk and Luhansk and two days before the Kremlin head launched his broad-scale re-invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev arrived in Moscow.

While Russia’s invasion into Ukraine rages on, Azerbaijan and Armenia seem to be attempting to normalize their relations. Although the process is expected to be very slow, the two Caucasus archenemies are expected to engage into the economic development of the turbulent region.

Since the outset of my engagement with Azerbaijan in 2009, I became only too aware of the Khojaly Genocide, the worst single atrocity of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

For most of the year following the 44-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, problems in and between them appeared to dominate both the internal lives of these two countries and in the geopolitical situation of the South Caucasus.