Today’s guest post is from Aram Simonyan, a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Scholar at the University of Sussex.

Artsakh, or Nagorno-Karabakh, is an autonomous region primarily populated by ethnic Armenians. (That the region is part of Azerbaijan rather than Armenia is due to a 1921 decision by the USSR central government.) In 2020 Azerbaijan, with outspoken support from Turkey, gained power over notable territory in Nagorno-Karabakh. Then, in December 2022, the Azerbaijani government closed the Lachin corridor (the only land route between Nagornon-Karabakh and Armenia), thereby cutting off 120,000 ethnic Christian Armenians in the contested enclave from the outside world—and from food, medicine, and other primary goods. And in September 2023 Azerbaijani military, with the apparent support of the Turkish president, forces swept into towns and villages, killing, shelling, and bombing civilians—evoking trauma of the Armenian Genocide among the population.

Yet the reaction from the West has been shockingly muted. It’s hard to ignore the striking contrast between the round-the-clock media coverage of the Gaza conflict and the scarcity of news on Nagorno-Karabakh even when Azerbaijan was bombing Armenian hospitals, schools and beheading people. Critics have also pointed out how European institutions and Western companies have continued to do business as usual with Azerbaijan, notwithstanding its aggression.

Part of the justification for this may be that Azerbaijan helps meet the EU’s need for natural gas. (In July 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen referred to Aliyev as a “trustworthy partner” for gas supply to the EU, though since Azerbaijan imports gas from Russia, it’s not at all clear why the EU wanted to involve the Azerbaijani government in the supply chain.) But another reason is that Azerbaijan has made use of what critics have dubbed “caviar diplomacy”: the use of strategic bribery (direct and indirect) to corrupt and curry favor with Western governments and institutions. Continue reading →