Can we stop things falling apart? 2024 begins with wars burning in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine and peacemaking in crisis. Worldwide, diplomatic efforts to end fighting are failing. More leaders are pursuing their ends militarily. More believe they can get away with it.
Here’s the full text of the written interview that I gave to Dutch journalist Laura Oorschot, who incorporated some of the insight during her appearance on blckbx’s livestream on this subject on 22 September.
Abstract: The world has never been safe for small and vulnerable countries. Their perilous position has been largely determined by weak economic, political and military capabilities, which deprive them of the ability to ensure their national security effectively. The existing literature concerning national security of small and vulnerable countries reveals that overemphasis is placed upon diplomacy as the major instrument of advancing the national interests of such states while overlooking the importance of their supportive institutions, such as intelligence services. The literature regarding the role of intelligence services in national security demonstrates that the secretive nature of intelligence activities and their association with “dirty tricks” of statecraft demonises intelligence services, ultimately undermining their role in national security. Moreover, discrediting the intelligence services is fueled by frequently blaming the intelligence community for strategic failure, even when the inadequate political decision-making process causes it. Inquiring into the Georgian national security environment, which exemplifies well the difficulties faced by small and vulnerable countries, allows us to review and challenge the existing trends in academia regarding the interplay between intelligence and national security.
The 10th anniversary of the start of Ukraine’s Euromaidan, when thousands of demonstrators set up a protest camp in Kyiv’s central square, was last week.
Ukraine’s economy had been struggling and the Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych knew something had to be done to create new opportunities. Meanwhile the EU’s Eastern Partnership, the platform used by Brussels to engage with Eastern Europe, was keen to deepen relations with the countries of east, especially Ukraine. This led to a proposed political association and free trade agreement between the EU and Kyiv.
The North Caucasus has always been and remains a strategically important object of global geopolitics and geopolitical competition. Throughout Russia’s history, the Western political system has wanted to destabilize the North Caucasus in order to disintegrate the territorial integrity of the state. In the strategy of Western intelligence services in the North Caucasus, special attention is paid to the religious and ethnic factor.
The turmoil spreading across the globe makes it difficult to meaningfully respond to individual crises. The resulting expectation of impunity is emboldening aggressors.
In the last months alone, a bloody civil war has broken out in Sudan; Azerbaijan has conquered the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh; a Serbian militia has tried to destabilize the north of Kosovo; military coups have proliferated in Africa; the Sahel zone is increasingly turning to anarchy; and Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues unabated. The latest outbreak of violence, Hamas’s terrorist attack on southern Israel followed by Israeli retaliation on the Gaza strip, could still escalate into a devastating conflagration across the Middle East.
Instead of Russian and Western drafts of a peace treaty, there will now only be one: Azerbaijan’s.
Last month, Azerbaijan used force to seize control over Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed ethnic Armenian enclave, displacing almost the entire Karabakh Armenian population. It might seem that their exodus has paved the way for a comprehensive peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia: after all, if the Armenian presence in the region is no longer a political factor, what is there to argue about? Yet Karabakh was not the only source of conflict between the two countries. Behind it loom other territorial disputes.
By the time the last bus carrying ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh arrived in Goris, an Armenian city on the border with Azerbaijan, the scale of the tragedy had become clear.
The 19 September lightning offensive by Azerbaijan ended thirty years of self-rule in the breakaway region, located within its borders but – historically and as a result of the long-running conflict – inhabited almost exclusively by ethnic Armenians.
By the time the last bus carrying ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh arrived in Goris, an Armenian city on the border with Azerbaijan, the scale of the tragedy had become clear.
The 19 September lightning offensive by Azerbaijan ended thirty years of self-rule in the breakaway region, located within its borders but – historically and as a result of the long-running conflict – inhabited almost exclusively by ethnic Armenians.
“We stand with Artsakh,” reads a poster using the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh that hangs at Mirzoyan Library, a popular cafe and hangout spot for local hipsters and Russian emigres in the heart of the Armenian capital.
This place was recently transformed into a hub for humanitarian aid as volunteers started collecting and distributing boxes filled with clothing, shoes, food, hygiene products and children’s toys to assist refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh.
During a visit by a Moscow Times reporter last week, Russian and Armenian volunteers were packing cars with humanitarian aid destined for tens of thousands of refugees pouring into Armenia from the disputed territory.
A number of Russians who relocated to Armenia when Moscow started its war against Ukraine are now assisting ethnic Armenians who left Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan launched an “anti-terrorist operation” in the majority-Armenian enclave last month.
The Ethos charity, opened last year by a group of Russian emigres who moved to Yerevan following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, has had to re-orient its charity work, which initially focused on refugees from Ukraine, toward the influx of Armenian refugees, Ethos head Yevgeny Yevsyukov told The Moscow Times.
In addition to collecting humanitarian aid in Yerevan, the organization has also established distribution points in multiple Armenian cities, including Goris, a city in the southern Syunik province where ethnic Armenians sought refuge from Azerbaijan’s offensive.
Volunteers say they work almost nonstop in Goris, which has taken in a major portion of the 100,000 refugees who fled from Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Refugees were forced to sleep outdoors and use the streets as toilets because local hotels and camps were unable to accommodate everyone,” Yevsyukov said, describing the situation in Goris.
Ethos said it received over 30,000 requests for assistance from refugees in the week following the escalation of the conflict.
Many refugees had to leave their homes in a rush with no opportunity to pack their belongings when Baku lifted its nearly 10-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh’s only road to Armenia — a blockade which resulted in dire shortages of medicine, food, fuel and other necessities.
According to Yevsyukov, around 30 businesses and organizations, including Russian companies, are currently providing assistance to Ethos. Volunteers said that along with distributing food and clothes, they also started offering mental health support and legal assistance to refugees.
Ethos is not the only group of Russian volunteers providing assistance to refugees.
“I had no other option because offering help is not something extraordinary. It’s important to help people,” said one Russian woman, who organized a charity event and collected clothes and personal hygiene products for refugees.
“We must do what we can, and if we cannot change the political situation, then we can help those affected by it,” the woman, who recently moved to Yerevan and spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Moscow Times.
Another Russian emigre, Valeria Kopirovskaya, 29, who moved from Moscow to Yerevan last year, has organized charity film screenings to benefit Ukrainian refugees. But she too redirected her charitable efforts towards assisting refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh in recent weeks.
“I am trying to organize classes for children in the refugee camp because their schooling has been interrupted. We are planning to offer needlework and music lessons,” Kopirovskaya said, adding that she was also looking for therapists and psychiatrists for displaced people.
In the neighboring Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Anna, a Russian in her 30s who owns a vintage shop, started collecting clothing donations for Nagorno-Karabakh refugees.
“I thought only a few of my friends would bring their old jackets and hoodies to the store, but in just a week we collected about 200 kilograms of clothes, sneakers, jackets and toys for children,” said Anna, who declined to provide her surname.
According to Anna, the main problem lies in transporting the aid across the Armenian-Georgian border.
“The Armenian customs did not believe that these clothes were for refugees and not for sale and demanded a duty for shipping the cargo, which we cannot pay. We are now trying to enlist the support of the Armenian Embassy in Georgia or the Armenian diaspora,” Anna told The Moscow Times. “As a last resort, we will try to collect donations in order to rent several minivans and transport clothes ourselves.”
In addition to problems with logistics, some volunteers said they had encountered obstacles from local Armenian authorities.
“When the Azerbaijani ‘military operation’ started, we contacted the Goris administration. They provided us with the contacts of 500 families in need of assistance. However, when we delivered the aid, a person from the city administration informed us that the authorities had forbidden them from accepting our aid,” Yevsyukov told The Moscow Times, adding that “the local authorities said they don’t need help.”
According to Yevsyukov, Ethos’ office in Yerevan was also raided by police officers who checked volunteers’ passports.
“It seems as if [the authorities] just don’t want to show that they can’t cope with a huge flow of work,” Yevsyukov said.
The United Nations said this week that up to 1,000 ethnic Armenians remain in Nagorno-Karabakh out of its total population of 120,000.
Baku this week published its reintegration plan that says it guarantees residents of Nagorno-Karabakh — which was an autonomous region within Azerbaijan under the Soviet Union — equality of rights and freedoms, as well as the safety of every resident “regardless of ethnicity, religion, or language.”
However, Armenians said they feared repression and ethnic cleansing from Azerbaijani forces if they were to return.
Many Nagorno-Karabakh residents also felt let down by Moscow when, as they say, Russia’s peacekeepers, who were deployed to the region following the 2020 war between Baku and Yerevan, were unable to prevent Azerbaijan’s offensive last month.
“Refugees react differently to Russians. Of course, some of them are offended and upset because the Russian peacekeepers were passive when Azerbaijan launched its ‘military operation’,” Yevsyukov said, recalling his conversations with people from Nagorno-Karabakh.
“But there was nothing rude to us on their part. They asked where we were from. We answered that we were from Russia.”
“They thanked us.”