Armenia's Options in the Face of Coercive Azerbaijani Tactics Are Limited
By Benyamin Poghosyan, PhD, Chairman, Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies
The developments of the last year proved that assessments according to which by taking some 8500 square km of territories in the 2020 Karabakh war, Azerbaijan will be satisfied and an era of peaceful development will be launched for Armenians, were highly exaggerated, and had little semblance to reality.
Since the end of the 2020 Karabakh war, Armenia has faced a new, harsh reality along its borders with Azerbaijan. Some in Armenia hoped that after taking back most of the territories which Baku lost during the first Karabakh war of 1992-1994, an era of regional peace would start in the South Caucasus, while Azerbaijan would agree to continue negotiations to fix the status of Nagorno Karabakh within its 1988 borders. Baku was quite quick to dampen such perceptions. Azerbaijan established an economic region of Karabakh in July 2021 and started to aggressively push forward the narrative that war had ended not only the conflict, but Nagorno Karabakh itself, and thus it was senseless to negotiate over the status of a non-existing entity. READ MORE
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