The ‘Evil Empire’ Strikes Back: Ukraine, Kosovo, Armenia, Israel

Suddenly we have hit a historical fulcrum where all the predicted disastrous conflicts, having built up for decades, erupt simultaneously. Russia-Ukraine, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Israel-Palestine and the like flaring up across borders but also within borders, threatening even Western countries where supporters of each side now live in large numbers. Several of the latent ethnic, tribal, religious and imperial flashpoints have come alive. Why is it all happening almost simultaneously; is there a thread that binds it together?

In this column and years back in the Wall Street Journal I warned, along with many others, that Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia would lead to the same in Ukraine. (Georgia’s President of the time, Mikheil Saakashvili, subsequently went on every possible media outlet in the US and Europe warning of the threat.) The Israel-Gaza eruption was also anticipated by many, though few expected the ensuing torrent of horrors . Nagorno-Karabakh smoldered for decades too. Let us not forget, also, the near-eruption of the Balkans recently when Serbian militants attacked across the border in Kosovo. Meanwhile, many also predicted that, with the immigration policies or lack of them currently in place, Western countries would be as conflicted by the same longstanding inter-ethnic hatreds as the source countries. It should be noted that this scale of bloody discord, these days, is not plaguing East Asia. There’s a reason. And it fits the picture. More about that later.

These were ‘frozen conflicts’, as the saying goes. They stayed frozen this long and only re-inflamed completely with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The West, for example, has no trigger to pull in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Karabakh face-off. In truth, both the US and EU stopped thinking geo-strategically years ago. Washington stood down from the global Cold War after the Soviet collapse, only to get bogged down in the ‘war on terror’. Moscow, however, never stopped but rather grew in might, wealth and pugnacity while the West was distracted. And this includes the area of cyber and propaganda wars. Where the West is now vulnerable to internal division on any major topic, not infrequently amplified by Moscow’s cyber warriors, Russia’s information space shows no sign of such exposure. In an earlier column, we dwelt on how the Kremlin, for decades and even centuries, maintained the habit of planting minefields of division within its empire, and beyond, as a threat to local independence efforts – or to rival powers that try to maintain peace elsewhere.

So how do recent events fit that picture? In Armenia, properly independent leadership finally won power democratically with current PM Nikol Pashinyan in 2018. The Kremlin took it as an intolerable provocation. Pashinyan was virtually a product of a latter-day ‘color’ or democracy revolution, a particular bette noir of Putin. Which is why the great author of color revolutions, Saakashvili of Georgia, now lies poisoned and imprisoned in his own country under the Moscow-friendly regime in Tbilisi. It was the color-revolution movement in the 2000s that sparked the overthrow of post-Soviet style corrupt leaders in several countries. So Pashinyan had to be punished.

Pashinyan’s achilles heel was the political power of the Karabakh enclave and its militants in Armenian politics. Indeed, he won office by defying their sway over Yerevan. Armenia’s citizenry was sick of their corrupt, pseudo-nationalist, populist, Kremlin-aligned dominance over the mother country. Pashinyan pushed all of Putin’s buttons, as Saakashvili had once done, by winning through real democracy and booting out the Kremlin’s puppets. So the Kremlin made it clear during the smaller 2020 Karabakh conflict that Russia wouldn’t defend its client Armenia. Result: Azerbaijan fully cleared out the enclave this year with a bigger war. Moscow didn’t lift a finger to defend Armenia. So, manifestly, Russia had a hand in that conflict erupting. And just recently Russia’s Lukoil signed a deal to invest $1.5 billion with the Azeri oil giant SOCAR’s oil refinery in Turkey. Another blow to Armenia and Pashinyan.

Now, follow me closely here. Azerbaijan’s biggest security backers are Turkey and Israel. For the former, Azerbaijan is the last footstep on the newly arising land-continuum to Central Asia’s Turkic states. This will eventually present a flanking threat to Russian hegemony over its old colonies there. Putin has decided to meet the threat paradoxically by taking a share in it, thereby retaining leverage. Thus far, Moscow’s message to the Azeris is, we helped you take over Karabakh and build arteries between Turkey and the Stans. That’s the carrot, if you play along. We can all get rich in Moscow’s commonwealth of top-down states. Where’s the stick? See Ukraine? And now Israel. As this column has reiterated often, Israel’s interest in helping Baku is all about creating another regional power to challenge the mullahs in Iran’s backyard. Moscow didn’t interfere with that project… until Iran became a cornerstone military ally of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Suddenly, Moscow is too dependent on Iran to keep playing all sides, especially to keep helping Israel. You don’t hand a victory to Iran’s rivals in the Caucasus without giving Iran something elsewhere. Which is where we come to the Israel-Gaza conflict. Moscow giveth and it taketh away.

The extensive network of tunnels and the amount of ordinance deployed by Hamas suggests not months but years of build-up with tiny graduated accretions so as to stay below the radar. An operation so horrifically atrocity-laden had to trigger a massive Israeli response, so massive as to engender geo-strategic shake-ups. Iran no doubt calculated just such an outcome. The Mullahs hated the Abraham accords and this was one sure way to scuttle them. But beyond that, the shock-waves threaten to redivide the region into Israel vs Islam – with Iran in the vanguard. Any calculation aiming for a seismic regional shake-up… well, Tehran had to inform Moscow of the plan. You can’t help concluding that, therefore, the Russians certainly knew ahead of time, if they didn’t actually help plan the scenario. Because, in the end, shredding the rival’s umbrella of protection anywhere in the world will divert its resources from Ukraine. And cause divisions among minority groups within the rival countries or their spheres of interest. Hence Armenia, Kosovo, Israel. All flash-points susceptible to Russian provocation. They exist in Asia too but Moscow dare not impinge on China’s sphere of interest. Except to visibly signal Beijing that, at a pinch, instability could erupt there too right on China’s doorstep. Hence the theatrical antics between Putin and Kim Jong Un.