Opinion

Fifteen soldiers died today in Armenia. Another three were wounded, two of whom are in critical condition. They were not killed by enemy fire. They were simply trying to stay warm.

For more than a month, Artsakh has been cut off from the rest of the world by the joint will of Azerbaijan and Russia as the international community watches silently because Artsakh is the blind spot of the peace negotiations, writes Gaidz Minassian.

There are three scenarios of how the war in Ukraine might end for Russia and what this will mean for the three countries of the South Caucasus. Gaidz Minassian examines the strategies of the players in the region.

Baku does not want an equitable peace, the West struggles to advance the negotiations, and Moscow prefers freezing the process to create a new status quo it can control. Yerevan will need to enhance its bargaining abilities by engaging in asymmetrical aggressive bargaining.

As Artsakh is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster, three actors — Russia, Azerbaijan and the West — have taken the population of Artsakh hostage, writes Gaidz Minassian.

The interplay between two conflicts, one in Eastern Europe, the other in the Caucasus provides a global dimension to the issues they contain. Beyond the common space-time matrix, what can we learn from what lies at the nexus of these two conflicts?

While the actors have changed and the Old World framework was replaced by a New World format comprised of 21st century individuals, the recent Global Armenian Summit missed the mark, writes Gaidz Minassian.

Suddenly Yerevan felt like Europe in the 1930s or 1940s: a crossroads, full of people from different places, with different histories, living with different temporalities of trauma related to different conflicts, and the sense that everything could change in a moment.

An existential crisis has erupted within the Armenian public discourse since the defeat in the 2020 Artsakh War. Gaidz Minassian argues that “all for the state and the state for all” must be the slogan of Armenians in the 21st century.

Pursuing peace is a noble and vital objective, but only when it is genuine. Azerbaijani and Turkish rhetoric about peace is anything but convincing at this moment. Lopsided peace is unsustainable and fragile and will not work if it is pursued at our expense.