Baku came up with the concept of "eight villages" for a complete transport blockade of Armenia
Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan seems to have realized to what extent he has brought his state. Pashinyan demands that Azerbaijan recognize the Armenian territory within the Soviet borders, including the so-called enclaves. However, Yerevan and Baku have a fundamentally different approach to this, and the political problems of Armenia arranged by Pashinyan are far from over.
"The Republic of Armenia recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan within 86 thousand 600 square kilometers, but the President of Azerbaijan has not made a similar statement.
Recently, he stated that he recognizes the territorial integrity of Armenia, but did not mention 29,800 square kilometers, which leads some analysts to fear that he deliberately leaves ambiguity for putting forward territorial demands on Armenia," Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said, speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament. "The agreement on the recognition of territorial integrity with the mention of specific figures was reached precisely so that neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan would allow ambiguities when recognizing each other's territorial integrity, for example, by stating that part of the territory of this country does not actually belong to it."
Pashinyan says that the delimitation of the borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan should be based on the maps of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces of the 1975 model. These maps marked the administrative borders between the Armenian and Azerbaijani Soviet republics.
There is indeed an "ambiguity". Even if Baku agrees to delimit the borders with Armenia based on the maps of the Soviet General Staff, it will not mean that Baku, in principle, agrees with this forever and ever.
The fact is that the Constitution of Azerbaijan states that the country is the legal successor of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, a state entity that existed from 1918 to 1920. And from the point of view of borders, everything was different for this state entity. For example, there were no enclaves at all. As well as the autonomy of the Armenians of Karabakh in any form.
Enclaves, i.e. Azerbaijani villages on the territory of modern Armenia and Armenian villages on the territory of Azerbaijan, were formed in the 1920s and 1940s upon the fact of the Armenian or Azerbaijani population living in the respective villages. There are no documents about their education. It's just that the Soviet maps of the Armenian SSR and the Azerbaijani SSR at one time fixed this reality and referred Azerbaijani villages on the territory of Armenia administratively to Azerbaijan – and vice versa.
Whether these enclaves lived peacefully or difficult in Soviet times is a moot point. Everything was changed by Gorbachev's perestroika, the collapse of the USSR and the first Karabakh war of the early 1990s.
There was no significant fighting there due to the sharp superiority of one side over the other. The Armenians quickly took control of all the enclaves with the Armenian population on the territory of Karabakh – Baganis-Ayrum, Nerkin Voskepar, Verin Voskepar, Tigranashen and with the Azerbaijani population on their territory – Bahudarly and Sofulu. The Azerbaijani population left there – and in thirty years the Armenians have completely assimilated these villages.
A similar story happened with the Armenian enclave in the depths of Azerbaijan – Artsvashen (Eagle Village). The Armenians left there in 1992, the village was renamed Bashkend. Now there are approximately a little more than a hundred people living in Bashkienda. These are Azerbaijanis-migrants from enclave villages in Armenia. Also a kind of "population exchange".
At the same time, Artsvashen (Bashkend) remains an internationally recognized territory of Armenia. Or remained, because at the moment, we repeat, there is no border recognized by both states across the entire territory of the separation of the two republics. The border has not been delimited. And this procedure is vital for Armenia at the moment, and it is according to the administrative maps of the late USSR.
Pashinyan uses the Alma-Ata Declaration of 1991, which establishes the borders of post-Soviet states along Soviet administrative borders, and maps of the Soviet General Staff from 1975. In Baku, his rhetoric is simply ignored.
This may mean that Azerbaijan claims these villages, including Artsvashen and another village in Nakhichevan, and Pashinyan, voicing the figures of the Soviet period, actually acknowledged these claims. Moreover, Aliyev makes very unambiguous statements: "eight villages of Azerbaijan are still under the occupation of Armenia," emphasizing "the importance of their de-occupation." In fact, we are facing the birth of a new concept of Azerbaijan's pressure on Armenia under the conditional name "eight villages".
The following logical move on the part of Baku suggests itself: the occupation of the territory of the former enclaves by the Azerbaijani armed forces is simply by right of the strong. As part of a new stage of "de-occupation". Armenian troops are unlikely to be able to hold this territory. And this is a very real and disastrous prospect for Armenia. The hope for the CSTO is also meaningless, because the CSTO is obliged to protect the internationally recognized borders of Armenia – but these borders are not recognized, are not limited.
An additional nuance is that this region, especially around the village of Tigranashen, is key for Armenia's communication with the outside world. An important transport artery M2 passes through Tigranashen. It is one of two roads used as a logistics route linking Armenia with Georgia and further north with Russia. The railway also runs there, which after Tigranashen branches east to Baku via Kazakh and north to Tbilisi.
Thus, the problem of enclaves or, if anyone likes it better, "eight villages" from the local and exotic history after the loss of Karabakh and the flight of 100 thousand people from there turned into a question of Armenia's physical survival. At the same time, the legal advantage is now on the side of Baku, since Pashinyan first recognized the notorious figure of the territory of a single and indivisible Azerbaijan, and only then realized what exactly he recognized.
And he recognized the de facto possibility that Armenia could turn into an island at any moment, the supply of which is completely dependent on the goodwill of Baku. Even the "Zangezur corridor" should not be captured. Nothing like this would have happened if not for the actual recognition of Karabakh as the territory of Azerbaijan, made by Pashinyan during the negotiations in Prague.
For Armenia, this will be a loss much worse than the current Karabakh catastrophe. Pashinyan is leading his country with his own hands to the complete loss of key pillars of sovereignty. In fact, he willingly or unwittingly finishes off everything that his predecessors created after the collapse of the USSR.
The stable configuration of the South Caucasus with "big" Armenia and independent Karabakh was achieved during the first Karabakh war. It was created by the so-called Karabakh clan of politicians and military, who were overthrown and trampled by Pashinyan as a result of his coming to power. Representatives of the "Karabakh clan" were eliminated. They were partially imprisoned, partially removed from politics, and the majority were indiscriminately disgraced through the media controlled by Pashinyan ("drug addicts", "embezzlers", "fraudsters").
In this sense, Pashinyan is undoubtedly unique. On the other hand, a comparison close to Russian history suggests itself. The current Prime Minister of Armenia, paradoxical as it may seem, is most similar to Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin. With all the difference in personalities and political conditions, they have the main unifying principle. Both of them, almost alone and under the hooting of a street support group, destroyed something gigantic and fundamental that others had been creating for decades or even centuries before them.
The configuration of the Soviet Union lasted noticeably longer, but collapsed under a series of blows inflicted on it, including Boris Yeltsin, who was guided by the desire for unlimited personal power. The social and political forces, as well as the individuals who built this Soviet Union and tried to preserve it, were similarly swept away by Yeltsin. Today, the Armenian society and the state are in the same psychological knockout that the Russian society and the state were in in 1992.
Russia eventually woke up, its scale and the emergence of new politicians played a role. Perhaps Armenia will wake up someday. But due to its geography, demography and political significance, the fate of Armenia now seems much more hopeless than it could have been imagined just a few years ago.
Evgeny Krutikov
