Putin's War Part 2.

This is how Russians learn about the world's wars

A column by Mikhail Zygar

Mikhail Zygar, born in 1981, is a Russian journalist and author. From 2010 to 2015, he was editor-in-chief of the independent Russian television channel Doschd. In 2015 he published the bestseller "Endgame - the Metamorphoses of Vladimir Putin". He published numerous other books and launched "1917. Free History", an online project about the Russian Revolution. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, he started an online petition against the war, shortly after which he left the country. Zygar is currently in Berlin.

Many Russians fled from Vladimir Putin, now they encounter dictators and conflicts in their new home countries. For the bloody collapse of the Soviet Union is far from over.

Another large part of the Russian emigrants went to Israel (only 20,000 received official migration status). They often had no idea how difficult the security situation there could be. The parliamentary elections in autumn and the victory of the extreme right-wing parties were a shock for many new Israeli citizens. They were horrified to discover that a radical government had been elected in Israel and that a new escalation was approaching.

And according to the statistics, Armenia and Azerbaijan have become even more popular as places of refuge. So more than a hundred thousand Russians are suddenly witnessing the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. A war they knew next to nothing about before, just as the rest of the world knows nothing about it. This news rarely comes to the attention of the European and world media.

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh was almost the first sign of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The region, inhabited predominantly by Armenians, was a de jure autonomous territory within Azerbaijan during the Soviet era. With the onset of perestroika, Armenian protests broke out in the region, then anti-Armenian pogroms erupted in Azerbaijan and turned into full-scale battles.

The legendary human rights activist and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov travelled to Nagorno-Karabakh at the time and tried to mediate - in vain. In 1988, there was finally a terrible earthquake in Armenia and Gorbachev visited the republic. He was shocked and at the same time infuriated that the victims kept telling him about Karabakh and had believed that all territorial disputes should fade into the background after this tragedy. Instead, they intensified.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Geographically, Nagorno-Karabakh has always been an enclave in the middle of Azerbaijan. But in the 1990s, the Armenian army conquered not only the territory of the former autonomous oblast, but also the region populated by Azerbaijanis that separates Karabakh from Armenia, including the so-called Lachin corridor. However, this area was not annexed to Armenia, but declared itself the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. This division remained largely formal for years, as Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh practically lived as one country.

Kim Kardashian supported Armenia with Instagram posts
In 2020, a new war broke out. While the whole world was preoccupied with the Covid 19 pandemic, the Azerbaijani army, backed by Turkey, was taking revenge for the defeat of almost 30 years ago. Armenian-born Kim Kardashian supported Armenia in her Instagram posts, but not even that caught the world's attention. And even if the world press had written about Nagorno-Karabakh, it is unlikely that readers would have been able to distinguish who was right or who was to blame. From the perspective of international law, Nagorno-Karabakh is an Azerbaijani territory occupied by Armenia. But one can also look at the situation from another angle: In 2020, the Azerbaijani army attacked Armenian settlements.

It was a real war in the post-Soviet space, which today, 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, seems to have opened a kind of Pandora's box. The war lasted 44 days. Azerbaijan gained control over most of the Karabakh region. Eventually, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, mediated by Putin, agreed that Russia would send peacekeepers to guard the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
When war broke out in Ukraine and thousands of Russians moved to Armenia, one of the most famous of these emigrants was billionaire Ruben Vardanyan, who was on the Russian Forbes list for many years. He gave up his Russian passport, moved to Nagorno-Karabakh and was given an influential post in the government in November this year.

Earlier this week, the situation in the region escalated again: the Lachin corridor was blocked. The main narrative is that this was done by Azerbaijani environmental activists in protest against what they see as illegal mining in Nagorno-Karabakh. At the same time, a gas pipeline supplying the unrecognised republic was blocked. According to the authorities, 120,000 people are affected by the blockade.

My acquaintances in Baku explain the actions of the Azerbaijani authorities as follows: President Ilham Aliyev has realised that Vladimir Putin's military failures in Ukraine offer him a unique opportunity to get rid of Russian peacekeepers and the Russian presence in the region as a whole.

In a recent interview, the billionaire Vardanyan, who was hoped to bring about an economic miracle in Karabakh, compared the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh to the blockade of Leningrad during World War II. And he said he still hoped for help from Russian peacekeepers.

The new Russian diaspora in Armenia and Azerbaijan is horrified! Until recently, many of them were not aware of the full extent of the problems in the region, nor did they know almost anything about the wars of the nineties of the last century and the current twenties. And they certainly could not imagine how close the South Caucasus is to another war.

So the bloody collapse of the Soviet Union is still ongoing; Putin's invasion of Ukraine will not close the terrible chapter of Soviet history, but open a new one.

Russian propaganda media, meanwhile, report that the escalating situation around Nagorno-Karabakh is the result of an anti-Russian plot by the West. An attempt to open a "second front" for Russia. (According to their logic, Putin would have to join in on Armenia's side if war broke out again).

The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh has been one of the main topics of discussion in the social media of Russian-speaking émigrés for several days now, along with the war in Ukraine, of course. The most important question that the new Armenian residents ask their friends who have moved to other countries is: "Why is all the world's media silent about what is happening?"

What can we answer them? The Russian people, scattered all over the world, are acquiring a new sensitivity, an ability to perceive tragedies of which they were previously unaware. Until now, the Russians were prosperous and these days, as always in December, they were quietly preparing for the New Year holidays - and they did not notice anything else either.

VOLGOGRAD, Russia, Feb 2 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin evoked the spirit of the Soviet army that defeated Nazi German forces at Stalingrad 80 years ago to declare on Thursday that Russia would defeat a Ukraine supposedly in the grip of a new incarnation of Nazism.

In a fiery speech in Volgograd, known as Stalingrad until 1961, Putin lambasted Germany for helping to arm Ukraine and said, not for the first time, that he was ready to draw on Russia's entire arsenal, which includes nuclear weapons.

"Unfortunately we see that the ideology of Nazism in its modern form and manifestation again directly threatens the security of our country," Putin told an audience of army officers and members of local patriotic and youth groups.

"Again and again we have to repel the aggression of the collective West. It's incredible but it's a fact: we are again being threatened with German Leopard tanks with crosses on them."

Eighty years ago, the surrender of Nazi Germany's Sixth Army marked the end of the Battle of Stalingrad. Today, Russia uses commemoration events for its campaign against Ukraine and reinterprets history.

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