Palladium Archive: Armenia Is an Orphaned Client State

A journey through Armenia reveals a country on Russian life support. With Azerbaijan and Turkey in ascendency, the country’s lack of allies is its most existential threat.

Today, Azerbaijan announced it was launching “anti-terrorist” operations in the Armenian enclave region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The new offensive comes two years after a war in 2020 that saw Azerbaijan capture much of the region’s territory and its second-largest city, Shusha.

In 2021, Palladium dispatched correspondent Fin Depencier to investigate the current border area between the two states. Although it was a militarized area now patrolled by Russian peacekeepers, it was hard to see how Azerbaijani fortunes would be reversed in the event of another war—they had the leadership, weapons, and international support that the Armenians did not:

A year after Aliyev took office in 2004, Azerbaijan became part of the EU’s European Neighborhood Policy, which looks to include eastern and southern neighbors in Europe’s orbit. While Armenia is also part of this policy, Azerbaijan has been able to form closer ties with the EU by creating a gas pipeline called the Southern Gas Corridor, which passes through Georgia and Turkey, and directly competes with Russia in the European gas market. This project was finally completed on the last day of 2020. Azerbaijan’s strategy of containing its enemies by making them friends is similar to that of other Eurasian states; Kazakhstan, for example, has China, Russia, and the United States all leveraged in its favor via its oil and minerals. Armenia simply isn’t able to exert the same amount of leverage as Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan over its neighbors because Armenia’s natural resources pale in comparison to Azerbaijan’s oil and gas, which make up 90% of the country’s total exports.

You can read Fin’s article here. If you’re interested in how Ilham Aliyev came to rule Azerbaijan and successfully cultivate international support in the region, you also can read our analysis of his reign.

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That’s all for now.