Alarms have been sounding loudly in European chancellery lately. Al At least 150 people died on the Azerbaijan-Armenia border, is supported by two opposing countries in the Caucasus and by Turkey and Russia respectively. A little further east, border clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan with at least two deaths. These Central Asian countries, along with Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, form part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which met this Thursday and Friday. anti-military front strengthenedNATO. At the same time, there is information and misinformation about other conflicts in the region, especially the war. The possibility of Georgia opening a second front against Russia It attacks the disputed Russian-protected independence zone of South Ossetia.
The fear is that the war in Ukraine has had the effect of contaminating many of the “frozen conflicts” that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia, a regional power, is stuck in Ukraine and cannot project its power to any more fronts. France called a meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the escalation of the situation on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border.
“I wouldn’t say there is still domino effect”, thinks El Periódico de España Mira Milosevic, principal researcher for Russia, Eurasia and the Balkans at the Royal Institute of Elcano. “I think there is a lot of desire in the Western and Ukrainian media and political analysts to force Vladimir Putin down and thus end his “imperialist ambitions”.
Transnistria and Moldova
According to the analyst, if this domino effect eventually happens caused by the Ukrainian war and if Russia can’t project everywhere at once, the chips most likely to drop would be Transnistria and Moldova.
Moldova, which belonged to the USSR until 1991, is a republic with a population of 2.6 million that borders Ukraine to the north and east. To the north is the Transnistria region, on the border with Ukraine. It has a Russian-speaking majority and has declared itself independent with its capital in Tiraspol. It depends entirely on Russian economic and military aid, which has a powerful force. military “peace” unit deployed: 1,500 Russian soldiers and tons of war material in this strip that pretends to be a country but not many know about.
During the first weeks of Ukraine’s occupation, there were several bombings in Transnistria, but no further tensions have been reported since.
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
Two Tajik border guards were killed and 16 injured in Wednesday’s clash on the disputed border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. These two former Soviet republics are at odds over about half of their roughly 1,000-kilometer border.
Moscow asked both capitals this Thursday, Bishkek and Dushanbe, “Political dialogue to stop any provocation”. The conflict in this region of Russian influence occurred just hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), the neighboring country of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The two leaders are there for the first post-pandemic face-to-face meeting as part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. Putin and Xi congratulated themselves on their counterweight as “great powers” against the West. An anti-NATO axis that will be strengthened by the participation of Iran, which has signed a memorandum of understanding for joining the SCO with Iran. Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan.
“’Tans’ (group of countries whose name ends with ‘istan’) is an artificial creation of the Soviet era, communists who moved populations to mix and It is one of the hot spots in Central Asia.l”, Milosevic explains. “Undoubtedly, Russia remains the only security provider in the region, the only one with mediation capacity.” This puts him in a compromised and difficult situation.
Armenia and Azerbaijan
Armenia declared a ceasefire with Azerbaijan this Thursday, after two days of armed clashes on the common border. At least 150 soldiers died in both armies. The two countries are discussing a region called Nagorno-Karabakh between the two borders. There were about 5,000 deaths in 2020 In the conflicts between Armenia, which is supported by Russia, and Azerbaijan, which is armed by Turkey. Thanks to the Turkish Bayraktar drones, Azerbaijan maintained its superiority and almost all the casualties were on the Armenian side.
Hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan
This new eruption of violence did not occur in Nagorno-Karabakh, but on the border line between the two countries. Moscow’s Àlex Bustos reports that it is testing Russia in the midst of the war in Ukraine, as it may require the intervention of Moscow, which acts as a guarantor of peace in the region. Armenia has formally requested assistance from Moscow and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance in which Russia is the greatest power.
“The problem is, No matter how peaceful the dissolution of the USSR was described in the ninetiesThe fact is that this was not the case, and that is what we saw in the protracted conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, for example. [ambas ex repúblicas soviéticas]”, says the analyst from the Royal Institute of Elcano.
Georgia and South Ossetia
The tension in the region is generating a lot of disinformation and propaganda. “The Georgian Army has reportedly started moving along the North Ossetian border,” Ace said in a tweet from the military information account on Wednesday. There doesn’t seem to be any real troop movement.
Statements by the head of Georgia’s majority party in response to a request by a Ukrainian lawmaker that the country definitively attack South Ossetia’s independence zone and thus open a second front against Russia in the south. Iraqi Kobakhidze, leader of the majority Georgian Dream party, said: Georgians should be asked about a referendum If they want to go to war with Russia. The Kremlin-friendly press took the seemingly ironic out of context and made headlines such as “Georgia will allow a referendum to open a second front against Russia” or “Georgia’s ruling party responds to Kiev’s call to open a second front” found.