While Turkey has prided itself for mediating between Russia and Ukraine, Ankara has shown no such impartiality in the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, with Turkish leaders airing their support for Baku.
While the world is looking at Ukraine and Russia, a brewing all-out war is happening between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Fighting on the border of Azerbaijan and Armenia has started, and as two troops faced each other today, 99 soldiers were killed in the skirmish, with both sides taking hits. Armenia reported losing 49 of their soldiers, while Azerbaijan noted they lost 50. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decades-long conflict over the area of Nagorno-Karabakh. This region was considered part of Azerbaijan but had been controlled by Armenian ethnic forces since the separatist war ended in 1994.
Bulgaria has offered to export electricity to Azerbaijan in exchange for expanding gas supplies, acting Economy Minister Nikola Stoyanov announced during his visit to Baku on Sunday (11 September).
“With such a scheme – bartering gas for electricity, Bulgaria could receive quantities in the next four to five months, when we need it most in the winter,” he told state television BNT.
Prior to the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in early 2011, Damascus consciously sought to pursue a relatively balanced foreign policy toward most of its neighbors. Its challenges with Israel notwithstanding, Syria tried to maintain diversified and even-handed relations with Iran, Turkey, and the Arab world regionally and with Russia, the European Union, and the United States on the global level. However, when the Arab Spring uprisings brought political crisis home to Syria, the government’s sharp domestic crackdown gradually changed these conditions, resulting in Syria’s expulsion from the Arab League and the escalation of tensions with Turkey and the Western world. This threw Syrian foreign policy out of its traditional balance, compelling the country to rely overwhelmingly on support from Iran and Russia. The constricted room for maneuver on the regional and international stage has had numerous and varied consequences for Syria foreign policy over the past 11 years. But some of the most illustrative about-turns caused by the swing toward Russia could be observed in Syria’s relations with neighbors in the post-Soviet space: namely, Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Russia may have lost most, or nearly all of its former preeminent position in shaping the outside world’s perception of the other CIS countries and all the events and processes occurring in them.
As Ankara finesses relations with Moscow, top Turkish officials have quietly met with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov after years of chill marked by a string of murders of Chechen exiles in Turkey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Aug. 5 meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin appears to have turned a page in Ankara’s chilly ties with Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s Muslim-majority Chechen Republic and a Putin loyalist. Turkey’s foreign minister and intelligence chief, who accompanied Erdogan in Sochi, huddled with Kadyrov on the sidelines of the summit, and it was the Chechen leader who made the meeting public on Telegram.
Ankara has said both sides are focused on confidence-building steps to be taken “one at a time.”
Ankara has broken its official silence and provided details on ongoing reconciliation talks with its historic foe, Armenia. In a lengthy background briefing, a senior Turkish diplomat described the substance of the talks, what their goal was and the multiple challenges that lie ahead. Speaking on the sidelines of the annual ambassadors’ huddle organized by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the official stressed that in order to avert “big disappointments,” the sides were focused on confidence-building steps to be taken “one at a time.” The official was addressing critics’ claims that Turkey is deliberately keeping the pace of the talks slow in order to allow its regional ally Azerbaijan to pressure Armenia into further concessions on the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The EU is trying its best, but it is not a magician. For a peace treaty to be brokered and signed requires one country – Armenia – to halt its support for separatism. Armenia has often acted like Russia in both backing territorial integrity of states and backing the ‘self-determination’ of the Karabakh region in Azerbaijan.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in an exclusive interview with Mir Interstate Television and Radio Company on May 1, 2020, that is, a little over a year after he had assumed the presidency of his country, recounted – not without some pride at the results achieved – how Kazakhstan was managing to keep balance between the East and West. Put another way, in this case the republic’s second president and hand-picked successor of Nursultan Nazarbayev, expressed his readiness to continue to pursue a foreign policy of good relations both with the US and the EU, and with major neighboring powers. Yet this proved not to be destined to last for long. At the beginning of this year, it became already clear that Kazakhstan, according to Forbes.ru columnist Alexander Baunov, started losing its balanced position between the East and West. Why has all that changed so quickly? So let’s try to figure it out.
U.S.-funded biological laboratories are located in Armenia, Kazakhstan and Central Asian countries, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an interview with RT Arabic on Thursday, May 26.