Il gioco nascosto di Putin nel Caucaso meridionale

Written by de Waal. Generally, pretty weak retelling of what has been happening between Russia and Armenia. Not much new but some noteworthy passages (highlights mine):

>Armenia’s pivot to the West, however, comes at an extremely unfavorable moment. Flush with victory and benefiting from strong ties with both Russia and Turkey, Azerbaijan shows no signs of letting up its pressure on Armenia. Meanwhile, the other big regional powers around Armenia—Iran, Russia, and Turkey—are aware that the West is overextended. Despite their many differences, they have a common agenda, shared with Azerbaijan, to cut down the West’s strategic profile in the region and elevate their own. In April, for example, top U.S. and European officials in Brussels announced an economic aid package for Armenia. **In response, Iran, Russia, and Turkey each issued almost identical statements deploring the West’s dangerous pursuit of “geopolitical confrontation,” ] by which they meant Western intervention in Armenia.**

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>Putin recognizes the value of the South Caucasus to Russia, but since 2022, he has had little time for it. Moscow has no discernable institutional policy toward the region as a whole—or for other regions beyond Ukraine. **The war has accentuated the habit of highly personalized decision-making by a leader in the Kremlin who seems uninterested in consultation or detailed analysis.**

>This has left the region’s three countries with strikingly different approaches. Azerbaijan’s Aliyev, with his two-decade-old relationship with the Russian president, seems most comfortable with Putin’s way of doing business. He can also derive confidence from the strong personal and institutional support he gets from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the case of Georgia, with which Russia has no diplomatic relations, there are no face-to-face meetings or structured talks. (If Georgia’s de facto leader, Ivanishvili, ever met Putin, it would have been in the 1990s long before either man was a big political player.) Once again, everything is highly informal and conducted by middlemen. Here, too, business stands at the heart of a mutually beneficial relationship. Paradoxically, the one country in the region that has long-standing formal and institutional links to Russia—Armenia—is also keenest to break off the relationship.