Moscow consciously sold war weapons to Azerbaijan against its The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) ally, Deputy Director of Russia’s Institute of Political and Military Analysis, Alexander Khramchikhin writes.
“There can be long and interesting discussion on who Moscow objectively considers more advantageous to be friends with – Yerevan or Baku; or the fact of irreconcilable Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict should be ignored and attempt should be made to uphold neutrality. However, according to the facts, Armenia is a CSTO member, which supports Russia in almost all key international issues. As to Azerbaijan, it isn’t and hasn’t been included in any pro-Russian organization in the post-soviet area and never agreed its foreign policy with Moscow, being guided first of all by its ethnic kindred Ankara,” the analyst writes.”
“For instance, in March 2014, Armenia voted together with Russia in the UN General Assembly in favor of the Crimean issue, which is most important to us, while Azerbaijan voted against Russia. That is, Yerevan is the legal and actual ally of Moscow, while Baku isn’t. The author of the present article is not ready to answer how objectively good or bad this is for Moscow; he merely states the fact. Another fact is that the ally obligations should be fulfilled. In the recent eight years, Russia has demonstrated on the examples of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea and Syria that it is a very strong and reliable ally, while NATO showed on the same examples that the friendship with it is a suicide. NATO is in no way engaged in the Karabakh conflict, while Russia had its first serious “program failure” here.”
“In the recent years, Azerbaijan bought huge amount of modern military equipment from Russia, Turkey and Israel. Azerbaijan bought most of the weapons from Russia, this offensive weapons apparently being designed not for parades in the center of Baku, but for breaking the Armenian fortifications in Karabakh. One doesn’t need to be a diplomat or military officer to understand this. Moscow thereby consciously sold war weapons against its CSTO ally. From a commercial point of view, this was a very successful bargain, but from political standpoint it was dubious, to put it mildly. Moscow’s argument in this connection that “if we don’t sell, others will do that” is even more dubious, if not stronger and tougher in this case. Besides, “others” cannot sell certain things. For instance, merely nobody in the world has an analogue to the most powerful TOS-1A system, while exactly the latter can cause very great harm to Karabakh’s frontline troops. It’s absolutely unclear where Azerbaijan could find analogous T-90. Thus, the argument about “others” is not only rather cynical, but it also doesn’t correspond to reality.
Perhaps understanding all this, Kremlin exerted significant efforts to cease fire and restore the status quo in Karabakh. The trouble is that as mentioned above, this cannot last forever, while Moscow has no magic recipe for “the peaceful settlement of the conflict,” since it doesn’t exist at all. Besides, Yerevan has now very frankly “struck an attitude,” and this is understandable, since Moscow’s attempt to take up a pronouncedly neutral position in the light of the CSTO existence seems a little strange. In fact, Moscow still wants to see in CSTO an analogue to NATO, a powerful united military bloc. Now it can already be said that we will manage to have the analogue to the real NATO – a soap bubble, in which nobody is going to defend others.
Before the April war, Russia announced about the arms supplies, including the same TOS-1A flamethrower systems and Smerch multiple rocket launchers, to Armenia. And this was done by loan (We sold this equipment to Azerbaijan for the full price). This will to some extent restore the balance of forces in the conflict zone and will retain the status quo much better than all the diplomatic efforts, especially considering that the fall in the oil and gas prices has seriously affected the Azerbaijani military budget. Even the current, slightly noticeable military advantage of Azerbaijan doesn’t ensure its victory at all. If this advantage reduces, Baku’s decision on the military operation against NKR will move into doubtful future,” Khramchikhin wrote.