Osservatorio Strategico Mediterraneo Allargato

Key Takeaways

➢ Russia’s crackdown on the Russian-Azerbaijani community marks the culmination of a 7-month crisis between the two countries, showing the depth and persistence of their drift away, after signs of potential reconciliation.

➢ Azerbaijan’s retaliation underscores an increasingly assertive posture and agency consciousness.

➢ Russia’s parallel  pivot to Armenia appears fragile and inconsistent with its post-2022 strategy vis-à-vis the region

➢ With Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations looming over the South Caucasus, Russian projection is likely to be further curtailed regardless of their aftermath.

➢ The triangular entanglement between Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, until 2023 centred on the Nagorno-Karabakh security issue, appears in constant reconfiguration in a context of high volatility.

Latest Developments

On June 27^th, the Russian Federation’s judicial authorities in Yekaterinburg initiated a harsh crackdown on the local Azerbaijani community, resulting in a wave of arrests and the death under custody of two Azerbaijani nationals, Ziyaddin and Huseyn Safarov.[1] The events were followed by a heated exchange of remarks in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan accused Russia of “ethnically motivated persecutions”, resulting in an open diplomatic confrontation. [2] While Russia adopted a relatively conciliatory stance, expressing hopes for a reconciliation, Azerbaijan reacted promptly by cancelling the official visit of Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk and arresting three Russian journalists working at Sputnik’s Baku offices.[3] Parallelly, in an unusually inflammatory statement, President Ilham Aliyev publicly urged Ukraine “to never accept peace accords including territorial concessions”.[4] Reports from the Ukrainian military intelligence indicate that Russia has reacted by scaling up its military presence in Gyumri, Armenia, to counterbalance Azerbaijan’s assertiveness.[5]

Background

The present crisis marks the culmination of a seven-month-long deterioration of the relations between the two countries. After the shootdown of flight AZAL 8243 in 2024, Azerbaijan displayed an unprecedented confrontational posture vis-à-vis the Russian Federation, manifested through the closure of Baku’s Rossotrudnichestvo cultural centre under espionage accusations and by President Ilham Aliyev’s choice of not attending the Victory Day Parade in Moscow, one of the most symbolic events of  Vladimir Putin’s political machinery.[6] Between May and June 2025, before opting for repression, Russian authorities declared their intent for détente with Baku.

Nevertheless, rather than a sequence of mere contingencies dictated by the accident, the crisis reflects a vast rearrangement in the region’s power balances, sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent sharp recalibration of its military presence in the South Caucasus. Once the uncontested power broker of the South Caucasus in light of its capability of leveraging to its benefit the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through arms supplies to the belligerents, Russia’s traditional hegemonic role has been eroded. Its military overstretching in Ukraine, coupled with Baku’s assertiveness, forced the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and catalysed growing interests of external actors in the area.

 The reabsorption of the territory under Moscow’s acquiescence alienated its historically privileged interlocutor, Armenia, whose PM, Nikol Pashinyan, labelled Russian military presence in the country “a threat rather than a guarantee” and partly realigned to the West, by hosting the “Eagle Partner” military drillings in cooperation with the US Army and reinvigorating its relations with the EU.[7]

In a strategic volte-face, Moscow attempted to partly reestablish its regional prominence by strengthening ties with Azerbaijan and abandoning its longstanding preference for Armenia, as the declaration of “Allied Interaction” of 2022 with Azerbaijan and the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s accusation of “ungratefulness” against Armenia seemed to suggest.[8]

Intelligence Assessment & Strategic Implications

In the present moment, Baku further benefits from the Ukrainian War, having replaced Russia as one of the EU’s main natural gas suppliers, and enjoys key strategic defence contracts with Israel and Türkiye, which now represents its first supplier of arms and advanced weaponry, such as the Bayraktar drones. The latter’s political backing has deepened significantly with the joint 2021 Shusha declaration under the principle “two countries, one nation”, representing a fundamental partnership and vector of political affirmation.  [9]

Azerbaijan is very unlikely to accept a deeply asymmetric partnership with Moscow and recede to a clear-cut subaltern position within its Near Abroad sphere of influence. Whether the AZAL 8243 event represents a deliberate Russian action against a recalcitrant partner or not is a matter of mere speculation; nonetheless, Azerbaijan’s recent positioning vis-à-vis Russian coercive policies signals profound dissonance between the Kremlin’s understanding of its relations and the Caucasian nation’s perspective. The nexus between the two events appears evident, as Azerbaijan has now declared that it is going to file international lawsuits against Russia over the plane crash.

During the first weeks of July, Armenia entered into an agreement with the EU to reinforce cooperation and partnership, signalling a quest for multivectorialism akin to Azerbaijan. Concurrently,  the ongoing  UAEU-mediated negotiations with Azerbaijan underscore the precarious and contradictory character of Russia’s late rebalance, given the reduced importance of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue and the Russian Federation’s irrelevance in the related talks.

• The Russian coercion-driven approach towards the region, epitomised by the events in Yekaterinburg,  is likely to backfire, not only due to Azerbaijan’s frustration but also in light of Armenia’s largely uncooperative attitude towards the alleged redeployment of 2,000 Russian servicemen to the once-strategic base of Gyumri, which was publicly denied by Armenian authorities.[10]

• Armenia, albeit heavily dependent on energy supplies and imports from Russia (31%)[11], is unlikely to return to the Russia-dominated security umbrella it previously relied on, which has proven to be hardly compatible with its national interests.

Conclusions

In conclusion, despite high levels of uncertainty, the Russian projection over the region will likely continue to face increasing pressure. The recent crisis signals Azerbaijan’s will to assert itself as an autonomous actor and its scarce reception of Russian coercive tools. While the outcome peace process is very likely to remain the decisive factor in determining the regional balances, Russia’s capability to exploit it to assert its influence appears significantly undermined. At the same time, this should not be erroneously read as a decisive dismantling of Russian influence over the South Caucasus, which remains entrenched in multiple cultural, economic and political engagements. It rather highlights the hybris of Russian great-power politics vis-à-vis its partners in a mutating context characterised by the post-2022 shock of an open full-scale war in the post-Soviet Space.

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