Armenia: “A new war of occupation is coming to the gates of Europe”

The other two – with Azerbaijan to the east and southwest, and with Turkey to the west – have been hermetically sealed since 1991. The interests of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Russia are therefore converging in order to take Armenia in its stranglehold and force it to abdicate its already severely limited sovereignty.

The second objective is consubstantial with the first: to nibble away at the neighbour weakened by its massive defeat in 2020 by betting on the policy of the fait accompli for the future delimitation of the borders between the two states. To do this, advance militarily into Armenian territory, in order to create at least a buffer zone several kilometres deep on the current contact line between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The groundwork for this was laid in May and November 2021 with the first advances in the north, east and south of Armenia, and is being deepened with the operations on 13 and 14 September 2022.

Azerbaijani troops have managed to take advantageous strategic positions that give them the possibility of conquering southern Armenia in a few hours; Yerevan, the Armenian capital, in a few days.

This possibility has been carefully prepared by the reactivation, since the end of the 2020 war, of irredentist rhetoric on the part of Aliev, who shamelessly covets as much of the neighbour’s territory as he can swallow. This rhetoric has long been anchored in the regime’s racist ideology, since as early as 2012, Aliyev stigmatised the sovereign Republic of Armenia as ‘a colony, an outpost directed from outside’ by a ‘lobby’, and as ‘an artificially created territory on former Azerbaijani lands’.