Russia: A Declining Counter-Change Force

Abstract

Russia made a fruitless attempt at negotiating a beginning of a resolution for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the late 2000s, but with the start of Vladimir Putin’s current presidency, the preference for sustaining the status quo has been firmly established. Moscow views every attempt at reinvigorating the negotiations (particularly by the United States) as against its interests, and seeks to maintain an asymmetric but effective balance in relations with the two protagonists. The war in Ukraine has changed the salience of “frozen conflicts” in European security, and Moscow is deeply concerned about the connection between this problem and the issue of “color revolutions” that dominates political thinking in the Kremlin. The main proposition in Russian Caucasian policy remains the preservation of the eroding status-quo.