Russia isn’t just mucking about in Crimea. Foreign Affairs has an article reviewing the long-simmering conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that wants to join Armenia (h/t Doug):

The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan started on the eve of the Soviet breakup, as ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan’s province of Nagorno-Karabakh rallied to join Armenia. Moscow armed both sides and played them against each other, turning a local dispute over the status of a territory inhabited by 90,000 people into a regional war. For close to six years, the newly independent states of Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over the territory, leaving 30,000 dead and creating around a million new refugees. Eventually, Armenia was victorious, and it took control of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven other Azerbaijani districts.

The end of the fighting, though, didn’t bring an end to the conflict. Both sides have regularly breached the cease-fire that was brokered in 1994, and deadly skirmishes erupt on a weekly basis. Through it all, Moscow has encouraged the fighting, at times revealing information to Armenia and selling arms to both sides. In addition, Russia has thousands of troops stationed in Armenia, it runs the country’s air defenses, and it controls key elements of its economy and infrastructure. As long as Moscow backs Yerevan, Baku can do little to make peace with its neighbor.

For its part, Moscow views the volatile status quo as a way to keep the South Caucasus under its control. For one, the unresolved conflict guarantees that Armenia will not ask Russian forces to leave. And as long as Russia has troops on the ground, it can pressure Armenia to stay away from the West. In the fall, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan to Moscow. Immediately thereafter, Sargsyan announced Armenia’s withdrawal from the European Union’s Eastern Partnership and stated its intention to instead join Moscow’s Customs Union.

The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is a de facto independent country, but the only other countries to recognize its independence are also unrecognized de facto independent countries. They are also all breakaway republics in former Soviet states: Abkhazia and South Ossetia seek to separate from Georgia, and Transnistria wants out of Moldova. The period from about 1989-94 saw a lot of wars.

It’s probably very difficult for us in the U.S. to wrap our heads around Russia and the Caucasus. Russia itself is made up of eighty-three federal subjects—eighty-five if you count Crimea and Sevastopol—with varying degrees of autonomy. This includes twenty-one republics—Crimea is the 22nd—with their own official languages and constitutions. We just have fifty states, the District of Columbia, and a few places like Puerto Rico.

The Caucasus region is its own category of complicated, geopolitically speaking. The South Caucasus has three independent former Soviet republics, while the North Caucasus consists of a whole patchwork of regions within the Russian Federation.

Anyway, I guess my point is just that the world is a complicated place, and we should try to learn more.

Photo credit: en:User:Aivazovsky [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Kbh3rd [GFDL, CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.