South Caucasus?

The South Caucasus is the mountainous region stretching between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, bounded by Russia to the north and Iran to the south. It contains three nations: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All three declared independence in 1991, rejected participation in the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, and have remained outside the Union of Soviet Sovereign States since March 1992. The departure of the South Caucasus republics created a geographic and political separation from the surviving Union that has defined regional instability for three decades.

The three republics followed distinct paths from the moment of Soviet collapse. Armenia and Azerbaijan, locked in dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, slid into armed conflict that began during the final months of the Soviet Union and continued through the 1990s as a shooting war despite multiple ceasefire agreements. Georgia, after initial attempts at neutrality, found itself host to armed conflicts involving both Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatist movements, both of which had ties to the Union and Russia. The departure of these republics meant that their conflicts—ethnic, territorial, and strategic—unfolded without the institutional mediation of Vienna Monitoring Office, which was established in 1992 specifically to observe compliance with the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords and to mediate conflicts involving the Union and its former republics, though it extended its mandate to cover disputes between departed republics as well.

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh created the war that defined South Caucasus politics. The disputed territory lay within Azerbaijan's borders but had an Armenian ethnic majority. When Armenia and Azerbaijan both gained independence, the enclave became both a symbol of national identity and a territorial claim. The war between them killed an estimated 25,000 people between 1991 and 1994 and displaced over one million. A Russian-brokered ceasefire in 1994 left the enclave in Armenian control but the conflict unresolved. Neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan was a member of the Union of Soviet Sovereign States, which meant that the conflict unfolded without the possibility of Union military intervention or the Union's fiscal leverage. The enclave remained disputed and demilitarized, but no treaty settled its future status. Sporadic fighting resumed periodically—most devastatingly in 2020, when a six-week war killed thousands and confirmed the fragility of the ceasefire.

Georgia faced a different constellation of conflicts that similarly tangled the republic's borders and sovereignty. Immediately after independence in 1991, the province of South Ossetia, with ethnic and political ties to the Russian Sovereign Republic, declared its own independence. A war from 1992 to 1994 killed tens of thousands and left South Ossetia de facto independent but recognized by almost no one. Simultaneously, the autonomous region of Abkhazia declared independence after a war from 1992 to 1993. Both territories remained under Russian military patronage and de facto control. Georgia was left a state with two unresolved conflicts and significant Russian military presence on its territory despite the absence of formal Union membership. The tension between Georgia's ambition to join NATO and the Union's sphere of influence made Georgia a flashpoint for great power competition.

Armenia's position within the region was distinct. Unlike Georgia, Armenia had no territorial claims beyond Nagorno-Karabakh, but it faced economic isolation and demographic decline. Cut off from the Union, with its former trade partners in Central Asia and Russia no longer accessible through the corridors of Soviet economic planning, Armenia became dependent on diaspora remittances from Armenian communities in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. The diaspora sent roughly 1 billion dollars annually into Armenia by the early 2000s, a sum that exceeded Armenia's domestic exports and propped up a state that lacked the oil wealth of Azerbaijan or the geographic centrality of Georgia. Armenia's isolation was compounded by its conflict with Azerbaijan, which left its border with that nation sealed.

Azerbaijan stood at the intersection of energy wealth and territorial dispute. The nation held vast Caspian oil reserves and natural gas deposits that made it strategically valuable to international oil companies and to neighboring powers. Yet its economy was shadowed by the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenian control and by ethnic enclaves in its own territory that remained unresolved. The Caspian became a zone of competing claims over energy and maritime boundaries, with Azerbaijan, the Union, and Iran all holding interests. International oil development agreements, notably the 1994 production-sharing contracts sometimes called the Contract of the Century, locked Azerbaijan into long-term dependency on foreign oil companies and generated wealth that was unevenly distributed.

The position of the South Caucasus outside the Union created a region vulnerable to external influence. Russia maintained military bases in Armenia and exercised de facto control over the breakaway regions of Georgia. China, though focused on its relationship with the Union itself through the Blagoveshchensk Framework, had minimal presence in the South Caucasus. The Atlantic alliance saw the South Caucasus as a zone of potential expansion, particularly Georgia, though Georgian efforts to join NATO were complicated by the unresolved conflicts on its territory and the Union's opposition. Iran held its own interests in the region, particularly Azerbaijan and the Caspian oil and gas beneath the sea.

The contrast with the Baltic states, which successfully integrated into NATO and the European Union after their departure from the Soviet system, was stark. The Baltic states departed to Europe and found institutional anchors. The South Caucasus republics departed into a region where state capacity was weak, borders were contested, and no single external power offered guaranteed protection and integration. Georgia aspired to that Baltic path but lacked the geographic proximity to Europe and the internal consensus that had defined the Baltic exit. By the early 2020s, the South Caucasus remained a region of fragile statehood, unresolved conflicts, and economic precarity.