25 April, 10:42
There is a business model they don't teach in international relations textbooks, but it ran flawlessly across the South Caucasus for three decades.
The logic is simple and ruthless: engineer a threat, freeze it at the right temperature - dangerous enough that no one feels safe, contained enough that nothing actually explodes - then sell protection from it to both sides simultaneously. Armenia pays in loyalty and a military base at Gyumri. Azerbaijan pays in restraint and gas contracts. You sit in the middle and collect rent from both. A frozen conflict is an asset that generates revenue indefinitely. A resolved conflict is the end of the business.
On August 8, 2025, the business closed. Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan signed a peace agreement at the White House in the presence of Donald Trump. Russia was not in the room. This was not a diplomatic oversight or a scheduling accident. It was a verdict on the model.
The Strategy Nobody Called a Strategy
What Russia did in the Caucasus for decades had no official name. In the documents it was "mediation," "peacekeeping," "security guarantees." In practice it was a systematic policy of managed instability: not resolving conflicts, but preserving them. Not building peace, but selling protection from dangers it had itself created and maintained.
Through the lens of Giovanni Arrighi's world-systems analysis - the framework I keep returning to in my work on Moscow's imperial logic - Russia functioned as a comprador intermediary. It did not produce security. It redistributed it, keeping the margin for itself. The model worked as long as both clients could find no other supplier.
The question worth asking is why Russia never simply occupied the Caucasus the way it occupied Chechnya. The answer is built into the model itself. Occupation destroys the business. Had Moscow annexed Azerbaijan, it would have lost the oil royalties, the transit rents, its role as arbiter between Baku and Yerevan, and its leverage over Turkey - in a single move. A frozen conflict, by contrast, is eternal. It can be heated and cooled on demand. It is not a zero-sum game. It is a perpetual revenue machine.
Chechnya itself demonstrated the cost. Two catastrophic wars, tens of thousands dead, international reputational collapse - and the result was not classical occupation but a delegated dictatorship under the Kadyrov clan. Even there, Moscow ultimately purchased the loyalty of a family rather than establishing control. The Caucasus as a whole - with its dozens of identities, mountain traditions of resistance, independent armies and external patrons - is an entirely different order of complexity. And Azerbaijan proved in 2020 that it could fight. Bayraktar drones and Turkish advisers rewrote the military equation well before the rest of the world saw the same lesson applied in Ukraine.
The Agreement Moscow Didn't Sign
The August 2025 peace framework contains 17 articles: mutual recognition of sovereignty and territorial integrity, renunciation of force, a ban on stationing third-country troops along the shared border, the opening of diplomatic relations, the withdrawal of mutual international legal claims. Border delimitation is the subject of a separate agreement.
But an agreement is not peace. It is the terms on which peace becomes possible.
Armenia's constitution still contains language Azerbaijan reads as territorial claims - Baku is waiting for amendments. The border remains undelimited. The fate of hostages and displaced persons is unresolved. And June 2026 brings parliamentary elections in Armenia. Moscow has already placed its bet on Robert Kocharyan, who made a pilgrimage to meet Kremlin operative Sergei Kirienko in October 2025 and returned carrying the talking point that "only Russia can build Armenia a nuclear power plant." If Pashinyan loses, the entire Washington architecture is back in question.
Corridors and Rents
The Zangezur corridor is not simply a road between Baku and Nakhchivan. It is the link that completes the Middle Corridor: China - Kazakhstan - Caspian - Azerbaijan - Georgia - Turkey - EU. Freight volumes along this route grew from 0.8 to 4.5 million tonnes between 2021 and 2024. Partners are targeting a tripling of capacity by 2030.
Turkey is the primary beneficiary of the new architecture. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, Black Sea ports, the Green Energy Corridor carrying electricity from Central Asia through the Caucasus to the EU. Ankara has become an indispensable hub between the Caspian and Europe, playing simultaneously in NATO and in the SCO.
China is investing systematically. Trade turnover with Central Asia grew from $70 to $95 billion in two years. In April 2025, Georgia handed construction of the Anaklia port to Chinese investors. The SCO is absorbing the region quietly and without tanks.
Here a distinction matters for those who read SCO expansion purely as a defeat for Russia. Azerbaijan and Armenia are already dialogue partners of the organization. Their full membership would be a marker worth watching. On one hand, it would legitimize multi-vector foreign policy: the formal right to sit at both the NATO and the Chinese table. On the other hand, SCO partners become less predictable on questions of sanctions compliance. Trading one patron for another is not a sovereignty strategy. It is a survival tactic. And Ukraine, which knows this particular choice intimately, has something honest to say about it.
TRIPP: How Washington Built the Road Into the Constitution
The Americans entered the region far more carefully than the headlines suggest.
TRIPP - the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity - is not simply a corridor named after a president. It is a legal construction. The United States secured exclusive development rights to the route, with land leased on a 99-year renewable term. The corridor will operate under Armenian law but be managed by an American-led consortium. Nine companies have already expressed interest in construction and management.
What this means in practice: the route runs through Armenia's Syunik province, parallel to the Araks River, along the border with Iran. This was not an accident of geography. A highway built along a border creates its own geopolitical insurance. Any military action in the corridor zone automatically means striking shared infrastructure belonging to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. The road becomes its own deterrent: destroying it costs both sides too much. And the 99-year lease means American presence outlasts any Armenian government. Even if Kocharyan comes to power, even if Russia restores its grip on Yerevan's politics, the physical infrastructure cannot be undone. Washington has put facts on the ground.
The Americans also built two parallel circuits. For decades Azerbaijan used the Aras Corridor through northern Iran to connect with Nakhchivan, and in 2023 Baku and Tehran agreed to expand the road and rail infrastructure along that route. TRIPP now offers an alternative through Armenia - not replacing the Aras route but competing with it. Two parallel lines, one of them under American management.
The strategic potential extends far beyond a highway. TRIPP's fiber optic infrastructure could link European and Asian data markets, bypassing Russian and Iranian networks. More importantly, a corridor running along a border is technically a spine for energy infrastructure: pipelines for oil and gas, power transmission lines. If TRIPP reaches its full operating capacity, it becomes the backbone of a new regional energy system - from the Caspian to Turkey and onward to the EU, without a single kilometer through Russia or Iran.
This is precisely why Tehran's reaction has been so acute. Supreme Leader adviser Ali Akbar Velayati warned that TRIPP would open the way for NATO to position itself "like a viper" between Iran and Russia, and promised to block it. How exactly Iran proposes to do this after the Epic Fury operation remains unclear. Tehran lacks the military capacity to close the corridor. It can complicate, delay, provoke - but it cannot void a 99-year lease with an American consortium.
New Institutions - Without the Old Players
The OSCE Minsk Group is an illustration of how a negotiating format can outlive the conflict it was created to manage and still produce nothing. The Minsk Group was formally dissolved on September 1, 2025, by unanimous decision of all 57 OSCE member states. Geneva discussions on Georgia remain ineffective. The "3+3 platform" - Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia plus Russia, Turkey, Iran - never functioned: Georgia refuses to sit at a table with Moscow and Tehran.
When round tables propose a Caucasus version of the Crimea Platform, it is worth pausing. The Crimea Platform is a tool for situations where you have lost and have nothing to offer except pressure and solidarity. Its only real function has been to keep a question alive on the international agenda. It has not changed a single fact on the ground.
The Caucasus is at a fundamentally different point. There is a signed agreement that needs implementing. A border that needs delimitation. A transit route that needs to start functioning. Elections that could overturn everything. What the region needs is a verification and mediation mechanism with real leverage - not a solidarity platform, but an institution with a function. The only thing currently working on the ground is the EU civilian mission in Armenia, extended through February 2027. That is the right model.
Instead of a Conclusion
The greatest geopolitical gain in the Caucasus over the past several years went not to the state that fought the hardest, nor to the one that paid the most. It went to the one that built the best infrastructure. Turkey.
Russia lost the Caucasus not through military defeat. It lost it through its own model: when you earn your income from instability, stability is your death. Baku and Yerevan made their deal without Moscow - and the entire architecture of Kremlin regional capital was written off in a single day, at the White House, in a room Russia was not invited to enter.
The question for the region now is not how to survive between great powers. The question is whether the countries of the Caucasus can build genuine agency before the new patrons have already decided, on their behalf, who they belong to.
Oleg Cheslavsky’s “The Russian Myth” is now available on Amazon and Apple Books.