Minutes before the first barrage began, up in the hills, volunteers and conscripts serving in the Nagorno-Karabakh Defence Army began noticing that the Russian peacekeepers who stood between them and enemy lines were jumping into vehicles and leaving in a hurry. Across the dusty gulf of no-man’s-land, they could see camouflage netting being pulled off Azerbaijani military hardware and ambulances lining up on the asphalt roads leading to the positions opposite, flanked by barbed wire and landmines.
Ruben’s wife, Nouné, had taken their two girls to the dentist. He grabbed his jacket and ran out of the house to go and pick them up. An air raid siren was ringing out all over the city, families were racing to the shelters, shops pulling down their metal shutters. The streets were a picture of chaos and confusion, the roads choked with parents trying to pick up their children from schools and kindergartens across town. Ruben found his family, took them to a shelter under a church next to the security services building, then went into work. They didn’t know it yet, but Nouné and the children would spend the next six days there.
As the Russians abandoned their posts — reneging on their pledge to protect the breakaway region following a war in 2020 — Nagorno-Karabakh’s troops dug in for what would be the final battle in three decades of fighting over the territory, inside Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognized borders but held by Armenian separatists since the fall of the Soviet Union. Within a week, local forces had been overwhelmed and the entire population was packing its bags to flee, taking what few possessions they could pack into cars or strap on the top of buses as they did.
The violent end of Nagorno-Karabakh may have been a sign of Russia’s diminishing influence as a result of its catastrophic invasion of Ukraine, but it was a personal defeat too for the then-president of the European Council, Charles Michel. At the same time as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was negotiating new fossil fuel deals with Baku, the bloc’s frequently sidelined other leader was trying to take on the role of mediator in the country’s conflict with Armenia.
The mild-mannered Belgian, an ex-prime minister, was theoretically in charge of the EU’s foreign policy but, in practice, spent his time picking individual issues to weigh in on. For nearly two years, whenever journalists reached out to Michel’s office with queries about some aspect of European affairs, they were batted away with a simple answer: He was busy trying to prevent a war in the South Caucasus.
Eyeing the power vacuum created by Russia’s strategic collapse in its former imperial hinterlands, this was an opportunity for the EU to step up, bolster its influence and replace Moscow’s brutal realpolitik with values-based humanitarian considerations. But, despite efforts to build relations with both sides, Michel’s campaign suffered from a fundamental failure to understand who he was dealing with — or how high the stakes were.
