Azerbaijan Holds Military Parade After Karabakh Victory.

3 hours ago7 min read2 comments

The thunder of military hardware rolling through Baku’s streets this week was more than a simple display of national pride; it was the closing argument in a three-decade-long geopolitical struggle. Azerbaijan’s victory parade, marking the anniversary of its reclamation of Karabakh, represents a seismic shift in the South Caucasus, a region long defined by a frozen conflict that has suddenly, and decisively, thawed.The spectacle of soldiers and sophisticated drones marching past a triumphant President Ilham Aliyev was a carefully orchestrated message to both domestic and international audiences: a chapter of history, opened by the collapse of the Soviet Union and characterized by ethnic displacement and bloody warfare, has been forcibly closed. For Azerbaijan, this is the culmination of a national project, a moment of catharsis built upon years of strategic patience and military modernization funded by hydrocarbon wealth.The 2020 44-day war was not an isolated skirmish but a masterclass in modern combined arms warfare, where Turkish and Israeli drone technology decimated entrenched Armenian positions, rewriting the playbook for mountain combat. Yet, to view this solely through a military lens is to miss the broader historical context.This conflict echoes the grim territorial disputes of the 20th century, where post-imperial borders drawn by distant powers sowed the seeds for future strife. The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but populated predominantly by ethnic Armenians, became a symbol of unresolved nationalist aspirations, a South Caucasian Alsace-Lorraine that festered for generations.The recent, final offensive in 2023 effectively ended the de facto existence of the Republic of Artsakh, precipitating a mass exodus of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians and raising profound humanitarian and legal questions about ethnic cleansing and the right of return. For Armenia, this is a national trauma, a stinging defeat that has triggered a profound political reckoning and a pivot away from its traditional security partnership with Russia, which stood by as its security guarantees proved hollow.The geopolitical ramifications are immense; Turkey’s influence in the region is now firmly cemented, while Russia’s role as the primary security arbiter in its so-called 'near abroad' has been severely diminished, creating a power vacuum that other actors, including the European Union and Iran, are scrambling to fill. The path forward is fraught with challenges.A durable peace treaty between Baku and Yerevan remains elusive, with contentious issues like the demarcation of borders and the establishment of transport corridors still on the table. The victor’s parade, therefore, is not an end but an intermission.As Churchill, surveying a different post-war landscape, might have observed, this is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Azerbaijan has won the war; the more difficult task of winning the peace now begins.

#Azerbaijan

#Karabakh

#military parade

#conflict resolution

#South Caucasus

#featured

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