The events around Syunik were unexpected, purely in terms of chronology. It was supposed that the tension around this part of Armenia would start to grow about four years after the second Artsakh War, when the term of the Russian peacekeeping mission was ending. This was an assumption based on the realities established at the end of the war, which, however, changed at the beginning of this year, causing Azerbaijan to start its attempts to provoke escalation much sooner.
The problem is that both Baku and Ankara thought that the occupation of the southern regions of Artsakh and the deployment of Azerbaijani troops in the immediate vicinity of the eastern border of Syunik would lead to a situation, when all international players would come to terms with the idea that Syunik and hence - Armenia would stop being a state with ambitions to become part of the transport communication hub, which should automatically turn Azerbaijan into a dominant regional state. Particularly, it refers to the ‘South-North’ Indian project, the talks about which intensified in 2019, which, according to the initial plan, was to pass through the territory of Armenia, including the Georgian and Russian seaports. However, this was a very dubious project, in the sense that it required huge investments, and it was difficult to expect that the same India could unilaterally finance this project. Moreover, even if India could successfully find a source of funding, the real work on the project could begin no earlier than, let us say, in 2025.
These calculations became useless just two months ago, when China decided to significantly expand its geopolitical presence by concluding an investment program worth about $ 450 billion with Iran, one of the components of which was the idea of creating a transport corridor across the Indian Ocean-Black Sea. It is interesting that Beijing gave a carte blanche to Tehran to determine the route of the corridor, and Iran offered Armenia to become a part of the corridor. This was a presumable decision, because, first, Iran could not afford to be completely dependent only on Azerbaijan, and besides, Azerbaijan and Iran have problems that may one day bring the relations between these countries to a deadlock.
It is clear that the Turkish-Azerbaijani tandem could not accept such a scenario, especially since the Armenian side stubbornly refused to pass the road connecting Nakhichevan to Azerbaijan through Meghri. In order to change the situation, to present Armenia as an unreliable partner, a rather serious information attack was launched, which was based on the idea that the Armenian authorities had ‘sold’ Meghri, that it was not a normal transport route, but a ‘corridor’ out of Armenia’s sovereign control. By a strange coincidence, this information mine exploded in Syunik just when the Iranian delegation was in Yerevan, which had arrived in Armenia to reach preliminary agreements on the ‘South-North’ corridor. The ‘explosion’ apparently did not give the desired result, as a result of which, by a strange coincidence, the Azerbaijani armed forces crawled into the sovereign territory of Armenia on the eve of the official visit of Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili to Armenia. Moreover, again ‘accidentally’ Garibashvili arrived in Yerevan to negotiate over the Indian Ocean-Black Sea transport corridor to “check the lines” between Tbilisi and Yerevan.
