By Benyamin Poghosyan, PhD, Chairman, Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies

The Russian resort town of Sochi was turned into the spotlight of South Caucasus geopolitics on November 26 as Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev for the much-anticipated trilateral meeting. The gathering was first announced by the Russian President’s Press-Secretary Dmitri Peskov to be held on November 8–12 to mark the first anniversary of the November 10, 2020, trilateral statement, which fixed the devastating defeat of Armenia in the 2020 Karabakh war. Some Armenian media leaked news about the upcoming meeting even earlier, arguing that another document violating Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh’s vital national interests was in the works. READ MORE

• December 2, 2021

Israel urged world leaders to keep up pressure on Iran and not lift sanctions as part of nuclear negotiations that were set to resume in Vienna on Monday, saying that tighter supervision of Tehran was needed.

• November 29, 2021

Turkey is ready to act as a mediator between Ukraine and Russia, President Tayyip Erdogan was cited as saying by broadcaster NTV on Monday, despite having angered Moscow by selling armed drones to Kyiv earlier this year amid tensions in eastern Ukraine.

• November 29, 2021

President Joe Biden's move to release oil from strategic reserves in coordination with top oil consuming nations including China represents a unique bet that finding common ground with the United States' biggest economic rival can help lower fuel prices for Americans.

• November 24, 2021

The European Union must make it clear to Russia that there would be a high price to pay if it acted against Ukraine, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told Reuters on Wednesday, urging the bloc to quickly agree on how to deter Moscow.

• November 24, 2021

China, the world's largest crude importer, was non-committal about its intentions to release oil from its reserves as requestedby the United States, while OPEC producers were not considering changing tactics in light of the U.S. action, according to three sources in the group.

• November 24, 2021

By Benyamin Poghosyan, PhD, Chairman, Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies

The developments of the last year proved that assessments according to which by taking some 8500 square km of territories in the 2020 Karabakh war, Azerbaijan will be satisfied and an era of peaceful development will be launched for Armenians, were highly exaggerated, and had little semblance to reality.
Since the end of the 2020 Karabakh war, Armenia has faced a new, harsh reality along its borders with Azerbaijan. Some in Armenia hoped that after taking back most of the territories which Baku lost during the first Karabakh war of 1992-1994, an era of regional peace would start in the South Caucasus, while Azerbaijan would agree to continue negotiations to fix the status of Nagorno Karabakh within its 1988 borders. Baku was quite quick to dampen such perceptions. Azerbaijan established an economic region of Karabakh in July 2021 and started to aggressively push forward the narrative that war had ended not only the conflict, but Nagorno Karabakh itself, and thus it was senseless to negotiate over the status of a non-existing entity. READ MORE

• November 24, 2021

By Yeghia TASHJIAN, Beirut-based regional analyst and researcher, columnist, "The Armenian Weekly”

“Co-opetition” was a term coined by Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff to describe a paradoxical strategy of cooperation among competitors, enabling them to collectively achieve mutual gains. It’s a relatively new term in international relations and used occasionally in international trade. Nevertheless, I will be using co-opetition to explain the current status of Russian-Turkish relations.
In foreign policymaking and geopolitical self-perception, Russia and Turkey resemble each other in many ways. Throughout the course of events in the Middle East and South Caucasus, as the West failed to engage with regional developments to resolve conflicts, other regional states such as Iran, Turkey and Russia filled the political vacuum. Hence, the Turkish-Russian interaction in the Middle East and beyond has been partially facilitated by the military and political withdrawal of the US and the European Union’s absence from the region. READ MORE

• November 24, 2021