In Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace Deal, Putin Applied a Deft New Touch - The New York Times

The vicious war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has settled into a tense truce enforced by heavily armed Russian troops.

“They say that things will be OK,” said Svetlana Movsesyan, 67, an ethnic Armenian who remained in the Nagorno-Karabakh capital of Stepanakert, even after narrowly escaping an Azerbaijani strike on the market where she sells dried fruits and honey.

With Russian support, Armenia had won control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan inhabited by ethnic Armenians, after a yearslong war in the early 1990s that was precipitated by the breakup of the Soviet Union.

9, they were pummeling Armenian soldiers along the road to nearby Stepanakert, home to a peacetime population of some 50,000 ethnic Armenians, and an even bigger battle appeared imminent.

Aliyev of Azerbaijan, according to several people briefed on the matter in the country’s capital, Baku: If Azerbaijan did not cease its operations after capturing Shusha, the Russian military would intervene.

But he, too, had to compromise: Nearly 2,000 Russian troops, operating as peacekeepers, would now be stationed on Azerbaijani territory.

It was a strategic boon for Russia, giving Moscow a military foothold just north of Iran, but also a risk because it put Russian troops in the middle of one of the world’s most intractable ethnic conflicts.

“I don’t know how it will end this time, because there is no good example of Russian peacekeepers in the Caucasus,” said Azad Isazade, who served in Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry during the 1990s.

Russian troops have since intervened repeatedly in troubled corners of the Caucasus, often under the moniker of peacekeepers but acting more like an invading army.

Aliyev — only in part because Azerbaijani forces were already strung out and faced a tougher, wintertime fight ahead while bearing the added burden of managing a hostile ethnic Armenian population, one analyst said.

Because Azerbaijan’s main ally, Turkey, posed what many Armenians considered to be an existential threat, Armenians have come back “to our default position: the reflexive perception of Russia as the savior,” said Richard Giragosian, a political analyst based in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

It was Russia that offered refuge to and fought with Armenians against Ottoman Turkey during the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915.

“The future security of Nagorno-Karabakh now depends on Russian peacekeepers, which gives Moscow the leverage they lacked.”.

9 peace deal says nothing about the territory’s long-term status, and ethnic Armenians who trickled back to their homes in buses overseen by Russian peacekeepers said they could not imagine life in the region without Russia’s protection.

Down the road from the Stepanakert military college now housing the Russian command, Vladik Khachatryan, 67, an ethnic Armenian, said there was a rumor going around Stepanakert that gave him hope for the future.

Mikaelyan said he saw one clear path to a sustainable peace: Nagorno-Karabakh becoming part of Russia