The South Caucasus in a Reconnecting Eurasia by Kuchins Andrew C.;Mankoff Jeffrey; & Jeffrey Mankoff

Author:Kuchins, Andrew C.;Mankoff, Jeffrey; & Jeffrey Mankoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442279650
Publisher: Center for Strategic & International Studies
Published: 2016-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

ARMENIA

Like its South Caucasian neighbors, Armenia also aspires to conduct a multivector foreign policy, but faces major constraints stemming from the barely frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and extensive Russian influence. As a result of the conflict, Armenia’s borders with both Turkey and Azerbaijan remain closed, and Yerevan is highly dependent on Moscow for its security, which, in turn, limits its ability to engage politically, economically, and militarily with the West—especially given the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations in the past few years.

Three times in recent years Armenia has expended major diplomatic energy to extricate itself from this corner, and three times it fell short. Yerevan initially embraced the diplomatic push by the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama to normalize Armenian-Turkish relations in 2009–2010. This effort ultimately failed as Azerbaijan leaned heavily on Ankara to maintain resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as a precondition for normalization and opening of the Turkish-Armenian border.

The second disappointment occurred in June 2011, when the three cochairs of the organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Minsk Group (the U.S., Russia, and France) agreed to a set of core principles for resolving the conflict that the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan were expected to sign at a summit in the Russian city of Kazan. The Kazan agreement, which resulted from the increased investment of time and political capital by the three cochairs, not to mention the thaw in U.S.-Russian relations that prevailed during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, was seen by observers at the time as an opportunity for a real breakthrough. The Kazan meeting, however, failed to produce as much agreement between Baku and Yerevan as the mediators had hoped, in part because of concerns about the potential for a domestic backlash in both countries.7 With the failure at Kazan, the favorable political conjunction passed, not least because leaders in both Baku and Yerevan increasingly sought to play the nationalist card to stay in power as opposition to their rule mounted. The chill between Washington and Moscow that broke out following Putin’s 2012 return to the Kremlin also made coordination among the Minsk Group cochairs more difficult.

Third, in the fall of 2013 Armenia and the European Union had virtually completed lengthy and complicated negotiations on an association agreement that would create a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA), like those the European Union successfully concluded with Georgia and Ukraine, when Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan made a sudden about-face and abandoned these negotiations, announcing that Armenia would be joining the Russian-backed Eurasian Economic Union instead. Our conversations in Yerevan lent support to the view that Moscow directly intervened to convince Sargsyan to abandon the DCFTA, something that Sargsyan all but acknowledged in his public remarks about the decision.8 Despite the breakdown in negotiations with the European Union, Yerevan continues looking for ways to deepen its economic and strategic engagement with the West to help balance its dependence on Russia. Armenia has resumed negotiations with the European Union in an effort to reach a set of

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