(Dr.Basel Haj Jasem – Researcher in Russian and Turkish affairs )
The agreement brokered by Moscow a few days ago saved Armenia from a cruel defeat, and saved the face of the Armenian authorities, and the Armenians’ approval of this agreement as a result of their realization that their army was no longer able to maintain their positions, which they controlled during the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s.
Azerbaijan regained control over all of its territories that Armenia occupied in 1992 outside Karabakh, and it will also keep lands inside Karabakh that it regained during this war, including the strategic city of Shusha, while the Armenians will retain control over the rest of the region, as well as the possibility of using the “Lachin” corridor, which It will be controlled by Russian forces to communicate with the Republic of Armenia that UN Security Council’s resolutions and international decisions can be implemented if there is strength and will that if all the conditions of the statement, signed between the sides, Azerbaijan and Armenia, are fulfilled, this statement will go down in history.
For the first time in modern history, the country (Azerbaijan) was able to regain the occupied territories after 28 years of negotiations. And the most important lesson that Yerevan did not realize is that betting or relying on a role for Western countries, its consequences are disastrous, and what happened with Ukraine and Georgia did not take long ago that the outbreak of hostilities in the South Caucasus at the end of September showed the ineffectiveness of the old political methods – neither Russia, nor the US, nor the UN Security Council were able to influence the situation.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the conditions under which the OSCE Minsk Group was established in the early 1990s differ from the current ones. Currently, Armenia has lost the territories that were under its occupation, without receiving any political benefits. France is one of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries, however, it is quite difficult to consider France’s diplomatic steps as neutral in relation to the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, due to the strong influence of the Armenian lobby in this country.
It is difficult to see the French diplomatic move towards the Caucasus conflict only through the influence of the Armenian lobby in France, where we notice Macron opposing Ankara in the Mediterranean, as well as the French position on the Turkish-Greek differences, the complex Cyprus issue, the confrontation in Libya, and Paris’ support for separatist terrorism in the Syrian Arab republic.
the difficulties are also caused by the fact that Macron made attempts to use this conflict to strengthen the position of his country in the European Union. Iran appears to be losing after the recent developments, and Russian soldiers appeared on its borders, and its geopolitical importance initially decreased for Azerbaijan after Yerevan agreed to open a corridor across Armenian lands between Nakhchivan and the rest of the Azerbaijani lands, and Tehran now has to increase its interest in the region at the expense of other files.
In conclusion, it must be said, for Ankara, the opening of a land corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan is the beginning of a new geopolitical and geo-economic era between Turkey and Central Asia.
