POLITICO: How Charles Michel waded into a minefield in Nagorno-Karabakh

PanARMENIAN.Net - Gabriel Gavin covered the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh for POLITICO, and the following excerpts are taken from his forthcoming book on the conflict, “Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh.”

The excerpts read:

Ruben Petrosyan was getting ready for work when he heard the first explosion.

The father of three had a desk in the unassuming office building that housed Nagorno-Karabakh’s security services. For weeks, he and his colleagues had known something big was coming. They knew it when their wives came back empty-handed after lining up at the shops for rations of bread and sour cream. They knew it when troops on the contact line spotted a massive Azerbaijani build up. And they knew it on Tuesday September 19, 2023, when the war started.

Minutes before the first barrage began, up in the hills, volunteers and conscripts serving in the Nagorno-Karabakh Defence Army began noticing that the Russian peacekeepers who stood between them and enemy lines were jumping into vehicles and leaving in a hurry. Across the dusty gulf of no-man’s-land, they could see camouflage netting being pulled off Azerbaijani military hardware and ambulances lining up on the asphalt roads leading to the positions opposite, flanked by barbed wire and landmines.

Ruben’s wife, Nouné, had taken their two girls to the dentist. He grabbed his jacket and ran out of the house to go and pick them up. An air raid siren was ringing out all over the city, families were racing to the shelters, shops pulling down their metal shutters. The streets were a picture of chaos and confusion, the roads choked with parents trying to pick up their children from schools and kindergartens across town. Ruben found his family, took them to a shelter under a church next to the security services building, then went into work. They didn’t know it yet, but Nouné and the children would spend the next six days there.

As the Russians abandoned their posts — reneging on their pledge to protect the breakaway region following a war in 2020 — Nagorno-Karabakh’s troops dug in for what would be the final battle in three decades of fighting over the territory, inside Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognized borders but held by Armenian separatists since the fall of the Soviet Union. Within a week, local forces had been overwhelmed and the entire population was packing its bags to flee, taking what few possessions they could pack into cars or strap on the top of buses as they did.

The violent end of Nagorno-Karabakh may have been a sign of Russia’s diminishing influence as a result of its catastrophic invasion of Ukraine, but it was a personal defeat too for the then-president of the European Council, Charles Michel. At the same time as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was negotiating new fossil fuel deals with Baku, the bloc’s frequently sidelined other leader was trying to take on the role of mediator in the country’s conflict with Armenia.

The mild-mannered Belgian, an ex-prime minister, was theoretically in charge of the EU’s foreign policy but, in practice, spent his time picking individual issues to weigh in on. For nearly two years, whenever journalists reached out to Michel’s office with queries about some aspect of European affairs, they were batted away with a simple answer: He was busy trying to prevent a war in the South Caucasus.

Eyeing the power vacuum created by Russia’s strategic collapse in its former imperial hinterlands, this was an opportunity for the EU to step up, bolster its influence and replace Moscow’s brutal realpolitik with values-based humanitarian considerations. But, despite efforts to build relations with both sides, Michel’s campaign suffered from a fundamental failure to understand who he was dealing with — or how high the stakes were.

If Armenia and Azerbaijan were talking, the Eurocrats concluded, at least it meant they weren’t shooting at each other. But, in reality, they were doing both. The near-daily clashes claiming hundreds of soldiers’ lives along the line of contact continued unabated, and EU officials, determined not to lose their role as impartial facilitators, refused to comment on who was to blame. Whenever there was even a hint of criticism aimed at Baku, Azerbaijan’s most prominent commentators would loudly warn that the EU was losing its perceived neutrality.

To speak to officials in Brussels was to enter a parallel universe where everything was moving in the right direction. Careful diplomacy was the only way to prevent misunderstandings, they had opined in 2022, when Azerbaijan launched its Two Day War against Armenia. The talks were really promising, they insisted a few months later, as the blockade began and people started to starve.

Peace, they maintained, had never been closer—just as it seemed more than ever like another war was on the cards. Every move Azerbaijan made to bring about the inevitable showdown shifted the frame of reference for diplomacy; they might have imposed the blockade but they’ve at least now agreed to let the Red Cross operate, so that’s a positive development, the thinking went. Baku was taking three steps forward and winning plaudits whenever it moved a millimeter back.

The heart of the problem was that the people in the room simply weren’t qualified to deal with the conflict they had waded into. Wars in and around Europe for almost the entire post-World War II history of the continent had been dealt with either by individual member countries, by the U.S. or, more recently, by NATO. There simply wasn’t the institutional knowledge or understanding of how to conduct this kind of high-stakes foreign policy among officials in the European Council or the European External Action Service.

In the arena of Western politics where they’d cut their teeth, the worst imaginable outcome was that a poorly phrased missive might rile an EU country’s prime minister or upset an industry lobby group. Now, they’d inserted themselves into a bitter ethnic dispute where the worst thing that could happen was somebody burning down your house and cutting your head off. That was simply unimaginable for career diplomats who put total faith in the idea that no problem was too big to be sorted out over a plate of sandwiches in a Brussels meeting room.

And while the EU had been represented in talks over other international crises, like the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian War, it had played second fiddle to more serious diplomatic services like those of the US, France and Britain. Now, Brussels thought it had what it took to run the show.