Speaking at Italy’s Cernobbio Forum on September 6, 2024, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev justified Azerbaijan’s conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh. “We fully restored our sovereignty last year, and separatism was eliminated from Azerbaijan’s territory in September. Ukraine is trying to do the same but without success despite significant Western support. We did it on our own,” Aliyev declared.
The idea that Azerbaijan’s attack on Artsakh is analogous to Ukraine’s defense from Russian aggression is backward, if not Orwellian. Not only Armenian diplomats, but also Western officials must challenge it. Outside Armenia, few policymakers or journalists and even human rights specialists truly understand the contours of the conflict. Narratives shape thinking. If justice is to prevail, Armenia must win the battle of the analogies.
In truth, Aliyev’s behavior is akin to that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, not Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. There is little difference between Aliyev’s denial of Armenia’s historic legitimacy and his embrace of the “Western Azerbaijan” fiction, His revisionism parallels Putin’s narrative on Ukraine. Seven months prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, Putin published an essay arguing that Ukraine had been part of Russia for nearly 1,000 years. “The name ‘Ukraine’ was used more often in the meaning of the Old Russian word ‘okraina’ [periphery],” he wrote. “The idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia,” Putin argued. “Since there was no historical basis – and [there] could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions.”
In reality, Ukrainian culture runs deep. Putin can create his version of Caucasian Albania, but his narrative is no more legitimate than Aliyev’s. As Ukraine seeks to rebuff the Russian onslaught, it acts to protect all Ukrainian citizens regardless of ethnicity or language; it does not seek to expel Russians from Donbas. Contrast this to Nagorno-Karabakh, where Azerbaijani forces expelled the entire population of ethnic Armenians whose roots in the region extended back more than a millennium.
So, if Ukraine’s defense of its territory against Russian aggression is not an accurate analogy for Azerbaijan’s assault on Nagorno-Karabakh, what is? Here, the former Yugoslavia looms large. Aliyev’s dehumanization of Armenians and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh are more akin to what Serbian President Slobodan Milošević sought to do first in Bosnia and Croatia and then attempted in Kosovo.
Indeed, Kosovo may be the closest parallel to Nagorno-Karabakh. Both are ancient regions. International machinations divided each from co-ethnicists and co-religionists across a border; they both suffered as chauvinist host countries persecuted each regions’ citizens. The parallels extend to personalities. Like Aliyev, Milošević was a bigot and a dictator. What Aliyev did to Armenian Christians in Artsakh was simply what Milošević would have done to sought to Albanian Muslims in Kosovo had the West not intervened.
