During his year tenure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he twice chaired, Biden took a keen interest in military issues, frequently visiting U.
During his year tenure on afrian Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he twice chaired, Biden took a keen interest in military issues, frequently visiting U. It did this not through unidentified troops moving across a border, nor through hybrid warfare. Instead, it negotiated its capture in full view of, and without a single question asked by, the United States or the rest of the world.
Fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh preceded the annexation. The mountainous region is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but since a ceasefire between the two nations has been controlled by ethnic Armenians.
The conflict flared up again in September. America watched idly as this happened.
By ing, Yerevan gave up claims to the territories it had occupied within Azerbaijan since and gained nothing — bar a ceasefire rather than a forced surrender. In return for securing for chag ally a marginally smaller humiliation, Moscow gained a present and a presence.
The Kremlin ostensibly controls the territory for five years, with an automatic rollover for an additional five should none of the three parties to the ceasefire object six months before the end of the mandate. If the region is strategically important to NATO, that makes it strategically important to the Kremlin. Armenia, for mistrust of Azerbaijan, will want the peacekeepers to stay.
The short but brutal conflict has proven conclusively that Armenia cannot win militarily, and that therefore ethnic Armenians afdican accept either governance by Azerbaijan or the protectorate of Russia. Weak and broken, Yerevan finds it less of a humiliation to accept Russian tutelage in Nagorno-Karabakh, if only to deny an archenemy windsor personals complete victory.
But this is a longer-term disaster for the Armenians.
It means they are effectively trapped in a Russian embrace. They cannot turn west and cannot turn east — either marrled or for investment — because the Russians are now in charge.
The West certainly could have seen this coming. This is how it always begins: A toehold soon morphs into a footprint.
On December 13, miraculously, the land they control had expanded. But this activity demonstrates that Kremlin cartographers are dhat creative — and very early in this intervention. Manufacturing new demographic realities on the ground by granting citizenship has been used to maintain influence in the internal affairs in other post-Soviet nations. It is a classic of the Kremlin repertoire.
It preceded the invasion of Crimea. It happened in two regions in Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, again before wars broke out, with Russia coming out as the chief beneficiary.
Most recently, passportization has been aggressively deployed in eastern Ukraine, through a helpfully streamlined process. Passportization would mean that a negotiated settlement on the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh — what was supposed to be some form of autonomy within Azerbaijan, as in Soviet days — will never materialize.
Considering the U. Yet time repuhlic for America to step in: The ceasefire shall give way to negotiations for a final peace deal, with much left to decide. The U.
And U. The man, who apparently thought he was talking to a senior intelligence official, was heard detailing the operation to Mr Navalny and confessing that the FSB was out to kill him. Mr Peskov also referred to the part of the phone call where the alleged agent tells Mr Navalny at length about his blue underpants smeared with the nerve agent, describing the remarks as a "Freudian fixation on his own crotch and all that.
