Armenia and Azerbaijan Have Signed a Peace Deal

Armenia and Azerbaijan have signed a peace deal that ends the conflict between the two former Soviet Republics since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 in the South Caucuses region. I had posted about an agreement reached between the two States in an earlier phase. After the Muslim Azeri dictator defeated the separatist ethnic Armenian Christians in an enclave, Nagorno-Karabakh, that was the basis of the conflict and the failure of Russian peacekeepers to protect the ethnic Armenians that Armenia was defending, the peace deal has become necessary to defend Armenia against a feared Azeri invasion of the Armenian corridor between Azerbaijan to its east and an Azeri exclave on its western border. The American-mediated agreement extends United States influence at the expense of Russia’s role that it had exercised since the end of the Cold War and breakup of the Soviet Union. An aspect of the deal are the rights to the transportation route from Azerbaijan to Turkey through the afore-mentioned Armenian corridor. The deal thus respects Armenian sovereignty and territorial integrity. It also ends the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s Minsk Group co-chaired by the U.S., Russia and France on Nagorno-Karabakh, from which most of the over 100,000 Armenian residents fled. There was no agreement about their right to return or their property losses. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have become more diplomatically distant from Russia with Armenia, having been let down by its Russian ally, and Azerbaijan angered over the Russian shootdown of an Azeri civilian airliner over Ukraine during Russia’s aggression against that former Soviet Republic that I had posted about. As I have posted, Armenia has been turning toward Europe and the West. Azerbaijan has been forging closer ties with Turkey, which is Armenia’s western neighbor and which is a traditional Russian enemy. The Azeri friendliness with both Islamist Turkey and Iran, which borders both Armenia and Azerbaijan to the south, added pressure on Armenia to conclude the best deal it could to protect the traditional Christian State’s sovereignty.