At the beginning of the month, the Armenian and Azerbaijani border demarcation commissions exchanged documents detailing the regulation of future activities. But this was not the unified document that had been expected. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had earlier that day refused to answer questions from the media as to whether the deadline set for such a document had been met or not. Even Radio Free Europe were unsure. While its Yerevan Bureau reported that the two sides hadn’t in fact managed to agree on the draft regulations, its Prague Headquarters at least reported progress.
As it turned out, the deadline had indeed been missed. “Something worked out, something didn’t work out,” one of Pashinyan’s MPs cryptically told the media three days later. “It’s okay, […] the deadline is not important.”
And maybe it wasn’t. Opposition protests led by a revanchist cleric had failed to disrupt the actual border delimitation and demarcation process on the Tavush-Gazakh section. Though Galstanyan recently toured the southernmost Siunik region of the country with a message of imminent disaster and an Azerbaijani and Turkish conspiracy to connect the two by force, something international commentators parroted consistently, that never really made any sense. On 10 June, US Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien visited Yerevan and highlighted how unblocking regional communications was a priority for everyone.
Yerevan should agree to the road and rail link between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan. By doing so, he argued, Armenia could better diversify its economic dependency away from Russia and evict Moscow from the South Caucasus. On 27 June, O’Brien delivered the same message in Baku while also underlying how Azerbaijan could use the connection to help Central Asia also diversify away from Russia. The objective would be to again bypass and even exclude both Beijing and Moscow from regional projects. Following the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Kazakhstan, that does not look likely.
It was always assumed that the US had geopolitical interests in facilitating an Armenia-Azerbaijan peace, just as Russia does. Now it was official. As a result, in recent days, some opposition commentators now no longer talk of a conspiracy to link Turkiye with Central Asia through a Zangezur Corridor, but what they sarcastically refer to as the Washington Corridor.
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The first indication of whether that obstacle has been resolved will perhaps be if Bayramov and Mirzoyan do hold bilateral talks in the US next week. There is also the next European Political Summit (EPC) to be held in the United Kingdom on 18 July. Some are already speculating that Aliyev and Pashinyan could use the opportunity as they did prior to the ill-fated EPC in Granada last year. That ended multilateral talks and Armenia and Azerbaijan have since shifted to a bilateral format though at the expense of what little transparency did exist. There are clearly more questions than answers.
The full opinion piece is available here.
