Armenia’s Postwar Crisis: What
to Know
By Célestine Bohlen,
CFR Expert
March 25, 2021
12:00 pm (EST)
Armenia has been riven
by disputes over its leadership since its military defeat by Azerbaijan last
fall. Newly called elections are unlikely to reconcile the divisions in
Armenian society caused by the battlefield losses.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has called for
early elections after weeks of protests and a standoff with his own army.
What’s going on?
Pashinyan,
Armenia’s forty-five-year-old prime minister who was elected in 2018 on the
back of a so-called Velvet Revolution, is banking on early elections set
for June 20 to quell a political crisis that has its roots in Armenia’s bitter
defeat in a forty-four-day war with neighboring Azerbaijan last year.
Pashinyan
himself triggered the crisis on February 23, when he suggested in a TV
interview that Iskander missiles provided to Armenia by Russia had
underperformed during the war. When a senior military official scoffed at these
remarks, Pashinyan fired the official, only to find himself publicly challenged
by the chief of the general staff and some forty top military officers, all of
whom demanded his resignation.
More
on:
Defying
what he called a military “coup d’état,” Pashinyan summoned his supporters to
the streets of the capital, Yerevan, to face off against demonstrators calling
for his ouster. The rival protests came to a head on March 9, when the
opposition—a coalition of sixteen parties— barricaded the parliament building.
The
debate about the performance of the Russian missiles was beside the point.
(Moscow denied they were even used.) The main issue is Pashinyan’s leadership
during the war and his continued defense of the tripartite cease-fire agreement
brokered by Russia. That deal forced Armenia to cede Azerbaijani territory
seized almost thirty years ago, after the first war over the disputed region of
Nagorno-Karabakh.
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Major
opposition parties signed off on Pashinyan’s March 18 announcement of early
elections, but some minor parties vowed to continue their protests, pressing
for the formation of an interim government ahead of the balloting in June.
What is at stake if the country’s political crisis
continues?
Prolonged
instability in Armenia could endanger the fragile truce that went into effect
on November 10. Even if Pashinyan’s government survives the June elections, his
authority has been damaged, and opposition to the truce negotiated last
November remains high.
Already,
much about the peace settlement remains unclear. The mandate for Russia’s 1,960
peacekeepers is still undefined; so is the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, the
ethnic-Armenian-majority region whose self-declared independence remains
tenuous.
The
Russian troops deployed as part of the deal have generally been welcomed by
Armenians, but their presence has raised concerns in Azerbaijan, given the
checkered history of forces Russia has deployed as “peacekeepers” in other
regional conflicts, such as in neighboring Georgia. Russia backed separatist
forces in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the early 1990s
and continues to hold sway over those regions.
Tensions
in the Nagorno-Karabakh region peaked again in recent weeks as both Armenia and
Azerbaijan announced on relatively short notice that they were conducting
large-scale military exercises.
Why are Armenia and Azerbaijan in conflict?
The
first war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh began in 1991 as the
Soviet Union was collapsing. Armenia then launched a military operation to take
control of a region that historically had been home to an ethnic Armenian
population living within the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
The
victorious Armenian army not only liberated the disputed region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, but also occupied seven surrounding Azerbaijani districts as
a buffer zone. The land grab led to an exodus of more than six hundred
thousand Azerbaijanis [PDF], whose displacement remained a
festering wound for the next three decades.
Last
November, after Azerbaijani forces overwhelmed the Armenian military with help
from drones provided by its ally Turkey, Azerbaijan took back the seven
districts, plus one-third of the so-called Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.
RUSSIA
CASPIAN SEA
GEORGIA
ARMENIA
AZERBAIJAN
Baku
Nagorno-Karabakh
Yerevan
TURKEY
100 km
0
IRAN
0
50 mi
ARMENIA AT A GLANCE
Area
11,500 square miles (slightly smaller
than Maryland)
Form of Government
Parliamentary democracy
Population
3 million
GDP
$13.7 billion
GDP Per Capita
$4,623
Life Expectancy
76 years
Primary Religions
Armenian Orthodoxy (93%), evangelical
Christianity (1%)
Primary Languages
Armenian (official), Russian
Russian Troops Based in Armenia
3,000 (estimated)
Sources: International Crisis Group; CIA World
Factbook; World Bank.
Has Russia gained influence over Armenia and the
region since brokering the peace deal?
Russia
has been widely credited with bringing last year’s war to an end, an
achievement that will allow it to keep its peacekeepers in the region for at
least five years. This has assured Moscow a major role in the region’s future,
likely at the expense of France and the United States, Russia’s partners in
decades-long efforts to negotiate peace through a forum known as the Minsk
Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
But
Russia now has to maintain a delicate balance in its relations with both Armenia
and Azerbaijan, a difficult task given that the status of Nagorno-Karabakh
remains unresolved. And although Moscow’s influence has increased, so too has
its vulnerability because of the position of its peacekeepers, who are in both
Armenia-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh and the critical Lachin Corridor, now back
under Azerbaijani control, that links the disputed region with Armenia.
Russia
has had cool-but-correct relations with Pashinyan since 2018, when he led a
peaceful movement that ousted a Moscow-friendly government. Pashinyan has also
steered a calibrated “multi-vector” foreign policy, seeking cooperation with
Europe and the United States while avoiding any challenge to Russia, which
remains Armenia’s major military ally.
Correction: A
previous version of this In Brief incorrectly referred to the number of
Azerbaijanis displaced from occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding
districts as 250,000. This error was corrected on April 8, 2021
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