Expert: small clashes could lead to new conflict and fateful  consequences for entire South Caucasus region

ArmInfo. As in Ukraine, so in the South Caucasus, 2024 will be a critical year, and one that will also test European decisionmakers. Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, wrote in his article published on the website of the Carnegie Endowment.

The full text of the article is presented below.

"The second half of the year will be difficult for Georgia. In  October, there will be an election in which the Georgian Dream ruling  party seeks to win an unprecedented fourth term and tighten its  increasingly illiberal grip on the country-while still keeping its  newly acquired EU candidate status.  Before that looms the issue of  Azerbaijan and Armenia and whether, yet again, this is a year of war  or peace. Negotiations are ongoing for a bilateral peace agreement  that would normalize relations between the two countries after thirty  years of conflict, but there is still the threat of violence in and  around southern Armenia-in the region called Syunik, historically  known as Zangezur.

On February 13, the Armenian military reported that two of its  soldiers had been killed by fire from the Azerbaijani side near the  village of Nerkin Hand in Syunik. It is an area close to Azerbaijan,  where monitors from the EU border mission, EUMA, have previously been  denied access by Russian border guards.

Azerbaijan still holds most of the cards. President Ilham Aliyev was  re- elected for a fifth term as president on February 7. He has never  looked so confident. Aliyev derives new legitimacy with the public  from his military victory last September when his forces captured  Nagorny Karabakh in a lightning operation, forcing the entire  Armenian population to flee and resolving the decades-old conflict by  violence.

The Karabakh operation accelerated a cooling of relations between  Azerbaijan and the West, which had been trying to broker a peaceful  resolution of the conflict until the last moment. This as the  Armenia-Russia relationship is in a process of spectacular breakdown  and the EU steps up its engagement with Armenia.

Conversely, Aliyev's confidence derives from a double insurance  policy with his two big neighbors: a tight alliance with Turkish  President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a mutually advantageous  partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The stress on the  two leaders rather than their countries is deliberate-these are very  personal bonds between men who speak the same macho language of power  and money.

The Western-facilitated negotiation tracks in Brussels and Washington  have been suspended since last summer. What is left is a bilateral  process, led by the Armenian and Azerbaijani national security  advisers, working on the text of a peace agreement.

It is a serious process that delivered a good outcome on December 7,  when Armenian detainees were released in return for Armenia dropping  a veto on Azerbaijan hosting the COP-29 climate summit in Baku at the  end of 2024.

A bilateral peace process without mediators has the advantage that no  foreign agendas or egos can get in the way of a deal. But the  Armenian side also fears that in a situation of asymmetry Baku can  use it to impose its agenda, demanding concessions while still  threatening to use force.  There are reported to be three main  sticking points in reaching a deal. One is the demarcation of the  border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where multiple maps from  different parts of the Soviet era give different interpretations of  where lines should be drawn.

The second issue is what kind of international guarantees and dispute  resolution mechanism there will be to make an agreement sustainable.  The Armenians want as much international backup as possible, while  the Azerbaijanis want to see very little written here.

The third issue is the highly contentious one of reopening a  long-closed corridor or transit route across 43 kilometers of  Armenian territory connecting the main part of Azerbaijan to its  exclave of Nakhchivan, bordering Trkiye. Azerbaijan has an interest  in reconnecting the two parts of its territory with routes that have  as little Armenian control over them as possible. Armenia does not  want to cede sovereignty or security over its strategically vital  southern border area.

There is a strong Western strategic interest in the second point, and  even more so in the third one-the issue of the so-called Zangezur  Corridor.  When it comes to security, Azerbaijan is insisting that  Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) border guards should guard the  rail and road connection. They cite a trilateral  Armenian-Azerbaijani-Russian ceasefire statement of November 2020,  which explicitly mentions this point-even though the rest of that  agreement has now been rendered defunct by events. In January,  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again insisted that this part  of the deal must be enforced.

For its part, the Armenian side is working to rid itself of Russian  influence, including the border guards deployed there after the fall  of the Soviet Union. It would be a major strategic blow if the  Russians were to stay, at the behest of Azerbaijan.

The working assumption in Armenia is that there is a deal between  Baku and Moscow here, which Ankara has quietly assented to. There is  at least circumstantial evidence to back this up. For the Russians,  control of the transit route would be a big success. They would be  formally handed control of a stretch of railway that links Russia and  Iran-and routes onward to the Persian Gulf-for the first time in  decades. This would be the major north-south rail route for Russia to  rebuild its connections with the Middle East as war with Ukraine and  contestation with the West stretch into the future.

The worrying scenario is that a peace deal will not be signed until  Azerbaijan gets what it wants in southern Armenia. To put it another  way, in 2024 Armenia is likely to come under big pressure from both  Baku and Moscow, using different methods, to accede to a plan for the  Zangezur Corridor that suits neither Yerevan nor the Western powers.

That is also why local incidents of violence, such as the one near  Nerkin Hand, need to be watched very closely. New conflict and  fateful consequences for the entire region could flow from small  clashes like this one."