‘There are no winners’: Armenia’s president lays out what’s at stake in conflict with Azerbaijan

Six weeks of fierce battles over Nagorno-Karabakh are entering an endgame. With Azerbaijani troops closing in on a strategic supply road linking the breakaway region with its backers in Armenia – and the rest of the world otherwise engaged – little would now appear to stand in the way of a final, bloody reckoning. Approximately 100,000 ethnic Armenians are thought to remain in the enclave, with many set to stay to the bitter end.

Armenians back in the mainland have descended into anger and despair, with a stunned political leadership leading the way. But one notable exception is the country’s president, Armen Sarkissian. A former physicist and computer scientist who spent much of his life in the UK, Mr Sarkissian is known locally as the “British queen”. Part of that is down to his largely ceremonial duties, but another part is down to his unusually phlegmatic demeanour.  

“Politicians on all sides are showing too much emotion,” he tells The Independent. “Someone needs to be cool, pragmatic and logical, and probably that someone has to be me.”  

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan make historical claims to the territories nestled between the two countries in mountains of the South Caucasus. The roots of the conflict stretch back a century. The Bolshevik leadership’s 1921 decision to place the largely ethnically Armenian region under the command of the Azerbaijani Soviet authorities is a crucial point of departure, creating a tinderbox that ignited just as the Soviet Union began to collapse. 

A war led to tens of thousands of dead, perhaps a million displaced, and ethnic cleansing on both sides. The region has been under effective Armenian control since 1994, with sporadic fighting par for the course.  

What makes the latest exchanges different from the skirmishes that went before is the new geopolitical backer in town. Overt Turkish military support for Azerbaijan – together with a ton of Israeli weapons – has transformed the disorganised Azerbaijani army into a hi-tech fighting machine. Mr Sarkissian, for his part, describes Ankara as a belligerent, expansionist power looking to upset the status quo of the region. Without Turkish support, the war would be over “in days”, he says.  

“Turkey is right on the front lines with food, soldiers, mercenaries, F-16 fighters and drones,” he says. “This is a Turkish expansion into the South Caucasus and – make no mistake – it’s a clear challenge to Russia for influence here.”

Diplomatically, the president sidesteps the question as to whether Armenia is disappointed by the lack of hard support from notional allies in Moscow. In 2016, for example, the Kremlin intervened to shut down skirmishes within days. This time around, it has taken a curiously neutral position. Some have suggested the change in response may have something to do with the poor personal relations between Vladimir Putin and the Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan, who was swept to power by a popular revolution.  

Mr Sarkissian says he does not see it like that. Yes, Moscow used to be more present, but those were “different times when Turkey was not involved”. Yes, there have been incidents of direct attacks on Armenian soil that fall under the auspices of common security agreements, with response clauses, but confirming these things was difficult “when there hasn’t been a massive attack”. In any case, Russia was hardly in a position to help, given the crises in and around its borders. “Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia,  Kyrgyzstan, Navalny, coronavirus, you name it, they are just busy,” he adds.

If that was meant as an endorsement of a regional power that likes to view itself as omnipotent, it was hardly a ringing one.

The former physics professor says Armenia has fallen victim to a new decentralised era of what he calls “quantum geopolitics”. New technology and transport networks have switched the source of power from institutions to individuals, or “quantum”, he says – and that has created a higher level of uncertainty. Coronavirus was one effect of the new upturned world; the re-emergence of Turkish expansionist ambitions was another: “None of the international institutions like the UN or Nato are able to intervene. There are no powerful leaders, just an unstable world.”

Mid-sentence, Mr Sarkissian cuts the scientific analogy short, conceding his theoretical analysis is of little use to Armenians today. “As intriguing as the world is, there is no fascination when thousands of young boys are dying and mothers are mourning,” he says. For the same reason, he would not be drawn into criticising Armenian mistakes. His fellow countrymen would be the judges, and he wasn’t about to criticise his government “in front of the international press”.

Yet much of the official Azerbaijani justification for the latest round of fighting has focused on the increasingly belligerent rhetoric of his prime minister, Mr Pashinyan. The former journalist’s almost biblical rise to power in the 2018 revolution initially provided hope for peace, but comments made earlier this year, describing  Nagorno-Karabakh as “undisputedly Armenian”, reportedly infuriated the other side. That was “the final nail in the coffin of the negotiation process,” claimed an adviser to Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev in comments to The New York Times.

President Sarkissian says that, indeed, negotiations were at one point going well. A final agreement even seemed in reach. There were just “a couple of outstanding questions” – one over the transfer of buffer zone territories and another over timing. And those were solvable with “political will and compromise”.  

But the idea that one comment changed everything was “absurd.” There had always been space for comments “designed for internal consumption”, Mr Sarkissian claims. Azerbaijanis got “more nationalistic” around election time and vice versa: “You have to be pragmatic, you have to wait a bit. You can’t start a war because someone said something.”

The president suggested domestic political troubles in Turkey and Azerbaijan sparked the war far more than any changes in Armenia’s posture.  

“Before the war, presidents Erdogan and [Ilhan] Aliyev were facing real economic difficulties and protests in their backyard, and now people are happy and feel like they are winning,” he says. “You win and everyone gets excited. Even the normally logical people can forgive you tens of thousands of young lives.  But it’s not a game of football.”

On Sunday, Azerbaijani authorities claimed they had taken control of the town of Shusha in the hills overlooking the Karabakh capital Stepanakert, and close to the all-important Lachin supply road to mainland Armenia. 

Whatever the truth of the claim, which is disputed by the Armenians, Mr Sarkissian insists the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will never be decided militarily. The continued struggles over recognising what historians describe as the 1915 Armenian genocide – pushed by descendants of the victims all across the world – showed that unresolved conflicts rarely disappear.

“So they conquer a piece of land, and we see more ethnic cleansing,” he says. “What next? Do we get another 100 years of conflict? How are we going to live as neighbours? Do they think Armenians will disappear? That we will move to Australia or Mars?”