hotel-rwanda.com

Chapter 83: The Contagion of Impunity: The Azerbaijan Precedent

Ilham Aliyev, the shrewd and calculating President of Azerbaijan, stood on the vast, curved balcony of his administration building in Baku, overlooking the steel-grey expanse of the Caspian Sea. Below him, the modernist glass facades of the Flame Towers glittered, monuments to the petrodollars that flowed from his country’s vast oil and gas reserves. For three decades, Azerbaijan had nursed a national trauma: the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh. This mountainous enclave, internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory, was stubbornly held by ethnic Armenians and had been "protected" by the looming, watchful shadow of the Russian military.

For decades, the global diplomatic community—the so-called Minsk Group, composed of Washington, Paris, and Moscow, along with the OSCE—had lectured Aliyev. They spoke of "peaceful resolution" to the "frozen conflict." They preached the sanctity of "final status talks" and the inviolable "Rules-Based International Order." They told him that borders in the 21st century could not be redrawn by tank tracks and that international law superseded national ambition.

Then came February 24, 2022.

Aliyev watched the unfolding disaster in Ukraine not with horror, but with the cold, assessing eye of a predator assessing a rival. He saw the "second best army in the world" bogging down and suffering humiliating defeats outside Kyiv. He observed Russian brigades—the very units that were supposed to be the guarantors of security and status quo in the Caucasus—being systematically stripped from their regional bases and fed into the bloody meatgrinder of the Donbas. Their elite forces were decimated, their ammunition stocks depleted. The power and presence of Moscow, once ubiquitous, was eroding by the day.

More importantly, he assessed the West’s response. He watched Brussels and Washington wring their hands, offering rhetorical condemnation and targeted sanctions but carefully avoiding any direct military intervention that could risk escalation with a nuclear-armed power. He noticed that while Europe loudly proclaimed its support for Kyiv, it also frantically sought alternative energy supplies to replace Russian gas—and those vital pipelines from the Caspian Sea ran directly through his backyard, making him an "indispensable partner" for Europe’s new energy security.

The "Rules-Based International Order," Aliyev concluded, was not a law of physics; it was a bluff. And the Russian security guarantee, for small nations in its orbit, was a hollow shell. The global chessboard was opening up.

On September 19, 2023, Aliyev called that bluff. He did not launch a negotiation; he launched a blitzkrieg.

Operation "Anti-Terrorist Measures" began with a precision and intensity that was distinctly un-Soviet. Azerbaijani forces, armed with advanced Israeli Harop loitering munitions (suicide drones) and Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones—the same iconic weapons that had once humiliated Russian tanks in Ukraine—struck the Armenian positions in the enclave. The Armenian air defense systems—a patchwork of old Soviet S-300s, theoretically protected by the Russian security umbrella—were vaporized in the first hour by relentless drone strikes.

The defining image of the conflict, however, was not the fighting. It was the inaction. Along the Line of Contact, positioned in their white-painted armored personnel carriers, were 2 thousand Russian "peacekeepers." They had been deployed in 2020 with a specific mandate to prevent precisely this scenario—a full-scale Azerbaijani assault. Yet, as the Azerbaijani artillery columns rolled past their checkpoints, the Russian soldiers stood down. They smoked cigarettes, watched through binoculars, and let the tanks roll by. Moscow, too exhausted to intervene militarily and too dependent on Azerbaijan’s energy for European supply and Turkey’s trade routes for sanctions evasion, had tacitly abandoned its oldest ally in the region.

The war lasted less than twenty-four hours.

The Armenian separatist government of Nagorno-Karabakh capitulated unconditionally. What followed was a biblical exodus. In a tragedy of historical proportions, the entire ethnic Armenian population of the enclave—over 100 thousand men, women, and children, representing an ancient civilization—packed their few possessions into cars and trucks and fled down the mountain roads toward Armenia, fearing retribution. A culture, a language, and a millennia-old presence was effectively erased in a week.

In Brussels, the European Union issued statements of "grave concern." In Washington, the State Department called for "restraint" and "protection of civilians." In New York, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed condemnations. But in Baku, Ilham Aliyev smiled. He had redrawn a map by force, achieved a historic military victory, and ethnically cleansed a region—under the internationally digestible guise of a "voluntary departure" or "evacuation." He had called the bluff of a superpower and dismissed the moral outrage of the West. And the ultimate consequence was... nothing.

The signal beamed out from Baku to every capital with a territorial grievance, from Caracas to Beijing. The era of the "frozen conflict" was over. The policemen of the world were either distracted by their own crises or simply too afraid to act. If you possessed drones, energy wealth, and the sheer political will, you could take what you wanted. The precedent had been irrevocably set: Impunity was the new, terrifying law of nations.

The Discourse 83: The Death of the Status Quo

83.1 The Collapse of the Security Guarantor
The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh marked a watershed moment in the disintegration of the post-Soviet security architecture. For decades, the stability of the Caucasus relied on a balance of terror maintained by the Russian Federation. Armenia was a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-led military alliance that ostensibly operates on a NATO-like "Article 4" principle: an attack on one is an attack on all. Russia maintained a military base in Gyumri, Armenia, and stationed peacekeepers in the enclave itself.

However, Moscow’s refusal to intervene during the Azerbaijani offensive—effectively standing by while a formal treaty ally was defeated and disarmed—shattered the credibility of the CSTO. It revealed to the world that Russia’s security commitments are entirely subordinate to its transactional needs. With its army bleeding personnel and equipment in Ukraine, the Kremlin made a calculated decision: it needed Azerbaijan (as a conduit for natural gas to Europe and trade with Iran) and Turkey (for economic survival and sanctions evasion) far more than it needed its loyal but impoverished vassal, Armenia. The lesson for all smaller states in Russia’s orbit, from Central Asia to Belarus, was brutal and unambiguous: the security umbrella is full of holes, and protection is negotiable.

83.2 The Gas Diplomacy Shield
Why was the Western reaction to a military conquest and ethnic displacement so noticeably muted? The answer lies in the harsh, pragmatic geopolitics of energy security. As the European Union frantically decoupled from Russian natural gas following the invasion of Ukraine, it turned to Azerbaijan as a critical alternative supplier. In July 2022, just a year before the decisive offensive, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen flew to Baku to sign a deal doubling gas imports via the Southern Gas Corridor, publicly hailing President Aliyev as a "crucial" and "trustworthy" partner.

This created a perverse incentive structure. The EU had effectively traded its moral leverage for energy security. When Aliyev struck, European leaders were paralyzed by the fear that criticizing Baku or imposing sanctions would jeopardize the very gas flows keeping European factories running and homes warm. Azerbaijan proved that in a global economy defined by resource scarcity, energy wealth serves as a potent diplomatic shield, immunizing authoritarian regimes from the human rights repercussions that usually accompany wars of conquest.

83.3 The Demonstration Effect: Solution by Force
The Azerbaijan operation has generated a dangerous "demonstration effect" across the international system. It provided a successful proof-of-concept for the "Solution by Force." For thirty years, the international community has spent billions of dollars maintaining diplomatic forums like the Minsk Group, preaching the liberal internationalist doctrine that "there is no military solution" to complex ethnic and territorial disputes. Baku proved the opposite: military solutions, if executed swiftly and with sufficient technological overmatch, are faster, more decisive, and more permanent than diplomatic ones.

This logic is infectious. It arguably influenced Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s renewed threats against the Essequibo region of Guyana in late 2023. Dictators across the globe watched the Karabakh scenario and concluded that a swift fait accompli, presented to a world exhausted by the war in Ukraine and distracted by domestic politics, faces little effective resistance. The concept of the "frozen conflict" is dead; conflicts are now merely paused until one side accumulates enough drones to finish them.

83.4 The Rise of the Middle Powers
The conflict also highlights the rising agency and autonomy of "Middle Powers." In the bipolar world of the Cold War, a conflict in the strategic Caucasus would have been managed—or suppressed—by calls from the red phones in Moscow and Washington. In 2023, the superpowers were reduced to spectators. The decisive actors were Turkey (which armed, trained, and diplomatically backed Azerbaijan) and Israel (which provided critical loitering munition technology). These middle powers are acting increasingly independently of, or even in opposition to, the desires of the traditional hegemons. As U.S. hegemony acts with restraint and Russian power degrades through attrition, regional predators are stepping into the power vacuum to settle old scores on their own terms, creating a more chaotic, multipolar, and violent international system where local military superiority trumps international law.