Russian Experts Outraged by Azerbaijan President’s Programmatic ‘Al-Arabiya’ Interview, a Turning Point in Baku’s Relations with Moscow

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 27 – Moscow experts have reacted with outrage to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s interview with the Al-Arabiya television channel, declaring that it contains “not one good word” about Russia, presages a further deterioration of relations between Baku and Moscow and could even lead to a military clash.

            (For the text of Aliyev’s 7000-word interview, see president.az/ru/articles/view/69968. For a survey of initial reaction by Russian experts and political figures on the Caucasus and the Middle East, see vpoanalytics.com/sobytiya-i-kommentarii/ilkham-aliev-o-rossii-ni-odnogo-dobrogo-slova/.)

            In his interview, the Azerbaijani president blamed Moscow not only for the recent cooling of relations following the downing of an Azerbaijani plane and the deaths of Azerbaijani activists in the Russian Federation but also for his country’s problems dating back to the 1920s when the Soviet Red Army occupied Azerbaijan and made it part of the Soviet state.

            In words that recall those of the Azerbaijani democratic opposition far more than those of his father, Haidar Aliyev, Ilham Aliyev blamed Moscow for suppressing Azerbaijani democracy and redrawing the borders to separate Azerbaijan proper from its exclave Nakhichevan, thereby creating a problem for Baku ever since.

            Almost equally horrific for Russian commentators were Aliyev’s warm words for US President Donald Trump, including the Azerbaijani president’s belief that Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, would have remained in office after 2020 had “the deep state” not stolen the election, and is a model for how other countries should deal with Azerbaijan.

            Such language is not only obviously music to the ears of the American leader but represents the sharpest turn yet by Azerbaijan away from Russia toward the West, something that Moscow commentators are alarmed by but have not yet figured out a way to reverse given Baku’s support for Ukraine and its growing ties with the West in general and the US in particular.

            In the course of his interview, Aliyev made two other points to which Russian writers have paid less attention to but that may prove equally important in the future. He said that he had good relations with the current Iranian president, an ethnic Azerbaijani, and would deal with him rather than with Iran’s religious hierarchy given that the Tehran leader was elected by the people.

            And in addition, he reaffirmed Azerbaijan’s close ties with Turkey, arguing that those relations were creating a new power center to the south of Russia, one that would include all the Turkic countries of the region and put it rather than anyone else at the center of discussions about the future of that region and the Middle East. 

            For all of these reason, Aliyev’s Al-Arabiya interview represents a major turning point in relations not only between Azerbaijan and Moscow but among the other non-Russian countries which emerged when the Soviet system collapsed and between them and the Russian Federation as well.

            As such, it deserves far more attention than the shooting down of the aircraft or the killing of activists which many have focused far more on that this programmatic outline of where Aliyev sees his country heading.