Over the past half century, Washington has repeatedly armed Kurdish groups in Middle Eastern conflicts, only to leave them exposed or outright abandon them in the next. In 1975, the U.S. abruptly pulled its support from Iraqi Kurdish forces, leaving them to face severe reprisals from the Saddam Hussein regime. During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. encouraged but then failed to support another Kurdish uprising in Iraq, leaving them to be again crushed by Iraqi forces. In 2019, U.S. forces withdrew from northern Syria, exposing Kurdish allies to a Turkish offensive. Yet the relationship endures because Kurdish groups believe they can exploit Washington in return. The U.S. gains a proxy force and the Kurds gain a conditional patron to advance their own ambitions.

The latest iteration of this relationship is unfolding in the mountains of northern Iraq, where exiled Iranian Kurdish militant groups have been strengthened by Washington and Tel Aviv to fight against the Islamic Republic of Iran. On February 22, five of these groups formed a coalition, pledging to coordinate efforts to overthrow the Islamic Republic and advance Kurdish autonomy inside Iranian Kurdistan, what they call Rojhelat, meaning “where the sun rises” or “east” in Kurdish. 

Three weeks before Israel and the U.S. launched the war against Iran, I visited a training camp for one of the most radical groups in this coalition, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), just outside Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq. While some Iranian Kurdish groups advocate for a federal system in Iran or greater Kurdish autonomy, the PAK has outright separatist ambitions. The PAK was the only Kurdish militant group to admit to launching attacks against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces during the nationwide uprising in January, in which thousands of Iranians were slaughtered by the regime.

“I want to thank America for its position against the Islamic Republic. To bring down this regime after 47 years will require outside support,” said Adila Jaff, a commander in PAK’s all-female unit. “When America launches its attack, our fighters will enter Rojhelat and pursue our goal of an independent Kurdish state,” she said. Female fighters have become a much publicized feature of many Kurdish militant groups, reflecting a political tradition that links women’s participation in combat to Kurdish self-determination—and a symbol of alignment with Western liberal values, likely with the aim of attracting Western support.

But more than four weeks since the beginning of the war, the Kurds remain apprehensive about launching a ground offensive, as Washington equivocates on its support and Tehran heavily bombards the Kurds along its western border. On March 4, Iran fired a ballistic missile at the same PAK base I visited weeks earlier, killing one and injuring three. Since the start of the war, Iran has launched dozens of ballistic missile and drone attacks against Kurdish coalition forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, but the Kurds are yet to launch any meaningful retaliation.

“The Kurds see uncertainty ahead in the war; whether that means U.S. long term commitment or whether the regime is sufficiently weakened. They would likely want guarantees of more long term support,” said Seth J. Frantzman, a Middle East analyst. “They’ve seen how Kurdish groups in Syria or the KRG in Iraq have had mixed results regarding long-term Western commitments. They are naturally cautious about putting it all on the line,” he said.

But the Kurds have deeply exposed themselves to Iranian attacks by signaling to Iran that an offensive was imminent without having a viable plan to launch one. Iran now has the initiative and, absent far more substantial support from the U.S. and Israel, an overwhelming battlefield advantage. They are already absorbing substantial losses by having walked down this path to begin with.

The Trump administration’s decision in late January to abandon its Syrian Kurdish allies in favor of the central government in Damascus is the latest example of American support for the Kurds expiring as strategic calculations shift. In their final week of autonomous rule, on the frontlines and in their receding strongholds, the Syrian Kurds I met with spoke bitterly—some even vengefully—about Washington’s betrayal.

“We fought ISIS for not only ourselves, but for America and the entire world. Now the [U.S.-led] coalition won’t even answer our calls,” said Avin Khalil, an administrator at a detainment facility for ISIS-linked families in northeast Syria. Since the Syrian government took control of the region, the U.S. estimates that tens of thousands of ISIS-linked detainees have escaped similar facilities, and are now unaccounted for. “When these men commit terrorist attacks in the west, the blood will be on America’s hands. I hope it happens,” Khalil said. 

The Kurds of Iran are merely on the other side of that patronage life cycle. On March 3, a CNN report claimed that the CIA had been working for the past several months to arm Kurdish forces along the Iran-Iraq border, with the goal of fomenting a popular uprising inside Iran. The U.S. has been heavily arming Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria for more than a decade as part of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, and also provided some limited support to Iranian Kurdish groups which have strong historical ties to Israel’s national intelligence agency Mossad. 

In its report, CNN cited an anonymous Iranian Kurdish official who said that “Kurdish opposition forces are expected to take part in a ground operation in western Iran, in the coming days.” The next day, Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani was asked whether Israeli strikes in western Iran were being carried out to support a Kurdish offensive, to which he said that Israel had been “operating very heavily in western Iran to degrade the Iranian regime’s capabilities and to open up the way to Tehran, and to create freedom of operations.” 

On March 5, Trump said in an interview with Reuters that a Kurdish offensive would be a “wonderful idea.” On March 6, Reuters reported that Iranian Kurdish militias had consulted with the United States about how and whether to attack Iran, and that the prospect of a cross-border offensive was gaining traction. 

However Trump quickly backed off, telling reporters on March 7 that “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran… They’re willing to go in, but I’ve told them I don’t want them to go in… The war is complicated enough as it is… We don’t want to see the Kurds get hurt or killed.”

Turkey appears to have been instrumental in pressuring the United States against supporting a Kurdish offensive. On March 7, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan said he had received assurances from Marco Rubio that Washington had “no intention of arming Kurdish groups in Iran.” “I have no doubt that [Turkey] applied maximum pressure across the board to prevent any sort of offensive by the Kurds taking place,” said Chris Kilford, Canada’s former defense attaché to Turkey.

Turkey is wary that heavily armed Kurdish groups could emerge as a cross-border threat similar to the PKK, said Sangar Khaleel, an expert on Kurdish affairs. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and has close ties to the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), one of the groups in the Iranian Kurdish coalition.

The coalition is estimated to have a combined force in the high thousands. Despite their newly established coordination via the coalition, their fighters are believed to be spread thin across the Iran-Iraq border and are lightly equipped. While airstrikes have significantly degraded IRGC infrastructure and capabilities, its ground forces remain largely intact. A U.S. ground offensive would be costly and difficult; for the Kurds to go it alone would be suicidal.

The coalition is aware of such risks and fears mass reprisals if it were to launch an attack without backup. Frantzman says, “Even if the IRGC appears to have weakened in their region, many fear the IRGC is only hiding in civilian clothes, waiting to carry out reprisals. Four and a half decades of suffering under such reprisals make the Kurds keenly aware of the cost.”

Fomenting broad internal unrest across Iran appears to have been a central component of Israel and the United States’ plan to trigger regime collapse. According to a report in The New York Times, the countries believed that sustained internal pressure—like what was seen during Iran’s nationwide uprising in January—combined with a Kurdish offensive and American and Israeli airpower, could tip the balance towards regime collapse. Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea reportedly said that within days of the conflict starting, Israeli intelligence services would be able to trigger civil unrest that would destabilize or even collapse the regime. Barnea sold this idea to Netanyahu, who sold it to Trump, and so it was set in motion. 

Twenty-year-old Glara Ilami spent a week in January protesting in the streets of Ilam, a Kurdish-majority city in Iran, before contacting the PAK and fleeing to Iraq to join them. She’s one of many Iranian Kurds that are now based with the coalition in Iraqi Kurdistan, hoping to cross back over soon with a rifle in hand. “When the U.S. strikes, Kurdistan’s Free Army will move in to establish our own state,” Ilami told me in early February.

The death toll of the uprising is difficult to verify. But even the lower-bound, confirmed toll is staggering—more than 7,000 killed. The Kurds, just like the rest of the opposition to the Islamic Republic, have been wary about returning to the streets ever since and facing more brutal repression.

But the opposition was never a unified movement to begin with. Kurdish separatist ambitions put them at odds with the broader, Persian-majority opposition, which insists on maintaining a unified state in the event of regime collapse. “The protests in Persian areas were mainly focused on inflation and the currency. The people of Kurdistan, however, want our own independent state. We want U.S. and international support to liberate our land from the occupation of Iran,” Ilami said.

Ethnic separatism in Iran is one of the regime’s main justifications for repression in minority areas. “By framing ethnic dissent as a threat to national unity, the state delegitimizes opposition in those areas,” said Flora Khani, an Iranian-Canadian lawyer and activist from Tabriz. Iran’s leading opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi, came out strongly against Kurdish separatism shortly after the Iranian Kurdish coalition was established in late February, saying that “Iran’s territorial integrity is non-negotiable.”

On March 20, I attended Netanyahu’s first press conference since the start of the war from a bunker in Jerusalem. When asked about the possibility of a ground component to the war, Netanyahu responded “You can’t do revolutions from the air… it’s up to the Iranian people… to choose the moment, and to rise to the moment. We can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, they have to exploit those conditions at a certain point.”

However a renewed uprising appears unlikely at this point, as Iranians would have to take to the streets amid a devastating U.S. and Israeli air campaign, knowing their compatriots were killed in January by a regime now locked in an existential fight.

Netanyahu didn’t exude much confidence in the prospect when he said that, “it is too early to tell if the Iranian people will exploit the conditions we are creating for them to take to the streets. I hope that will be the case. We are working toward that end, but ultimately, it will depend only on them.”

According to the New York Times report, Netanyahu has expressed frustration with the Mossad that its “promises to foment a revolt have not materialized… Mr. Trump might decide to end the war any day and that Mossad’s operations had yet to bear fruit,” the report says. The official position of the Kurdish coalition is that they remain poised to join the fight against the regime under the right conditions, like the U.S. and Israel enforcing a no-fly zone over western Iran. But for now, they’re sitting ducks, absorbing the Iranian strikes with little means or incentive to retaliate.

The new country had a rough beginning: neighboring Armenia claimed military victory in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1994, and Soviet dissolution kicked off a recession that lasted until 1995. But under the steady and authoritarian rule of Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan is now undergoing a category upgrade in regional influence. Azerbaijan has pivoted decidedly towards the West, strengthening ties with NATO, the EU, Israel, and Turkey during his rule.

It’s a pivot that might have easily failed in the face of Russian opposition or a Western cold shoulder, but Aliyev has revealed himself to be a cunning diplomat. While completely reorienting Azerbaijan’s foreign affairs, he simultaneously destroyed the Soviet husk that he inherited from his father. In its place, he has promoted a new generation of Western-educated loyalists with far greater national ambitions than their Soviet predecessors. However, his program has not brought about national success on all fronts; Aliyev’s critics can point to corruption, oil dependency, and stagnant growth for much of Azerbaijan’s broader population.

What Aliyev’s regime has cultivated instead is a winning political strategy for consolidating its rule. The result is expanding Azerbaijani power in Central Asia and influence with governments around the world.

The Struggle for Power

In 1997, a 36-year-old Ilham Aliyev—then vice president of SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state oil company—addressed students, faculty, and oil executives at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It is a great honor to speak at this university,” he began. “I have heard a lot about it over the years, since I was once a student myself.”

Ilham began his own academic life in the elite schools of the USSR. At just 16, he was admitted into Russia’s most prestigious university, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). A cynic might say that he only got in as the son of a powerful apparatchik. His father, Heydar Aliyev, spent decades as a high-ranking KGB officer and Politburo member, eventually leading both Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan.  But Ilham proved himself to be a dutiful student, and after he completed his bachelor’s degree in 1982 he went on to obtain a PhD in history in 1985. He then lectured at the university from 1985 to 1990. “We were then on opposite sides of the globe,” he recounted to his Harvard audience. “We were divided by politics, by systems, by confrontation, and it was very difficult for me to imagine, at that time, that someday I would be here, speaking to you.”

While Ilham himself experienced a privileged upbringing, his life was very much like other Soviet children when it came to his education, in which he was thoroughly indoctrinated with communist propaganda. But according to biographer Graeme H. Wilson, author of Ilham: Portrait of a President, the young Ilham wasn’t complacent in his thought. Wilson describes a “serious young man, a child who read a lot and one given to spending time in adult company rather than among his peers.” A similar picture emerges from his time at MGIMO: fellow student and Russia Today journalist Aleksandr Gurnov later recalled that “Ilham really studied hard and could never be accused of taking it easy.”

It’s hard to say when his disillusionment with the Soviet experiment set in. What is known is that Ilham emerged as an Anglophile at MGIMO. He learned fluent English and focused his studies on British culture, history, and political thought. His doctoral research was on Britain’s anti-war movement of the 1970s and ‘80s.

In 1987, the fortunes of Ilham’s father took a turn for the worse. Gorbachev dismissed Heydar from his post in the Politburo, officially for health reasons. Then in 1990, Heydar criticized Gorbachev’s government for the killing of Azerbaijani civilians in Baku. This turned the Soviet general secretary against him. Only days later, Ilham received a curt letter on MGIMO letterhead informing him that he was fired—his father’s disfavor with the regime had ended his academic career. Despite having an impressive resumé, Ilham discovered that he was politically tarred when looking for new positions: “I applied for many jobs in Moscow, and indeed elsewhere, but it became clear that I was on a blacklist somewhere. Several people even told me, ‘I would like to hire you, but I’m not allowed.’ It was very depressing.”

As the Soviet Union collapsed, Ilham decided to join the wave of new entrepreneurs. He ended up in the clothing business, purchasing a factory on the outskirts of Moscow. He had learned his lesson about relying on Moscow’s patronage and even briefly relocated to Istanbul. Then, in 1993, his father reappeared on the political stage in Azerbaijan. After winning a power struggle with the incumbent leader, the nationalistic Albufaz Elchibey, Heydar became president. It proved the turning point for both father and son. In April 1994, Ilham received a phone call: Azerbaijan’s first post-Soviet drilling partnership was being negotiated, and Heydar needed more trusted men. He requested Ilham return to Baku immediately and work as vice president of SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state oil company.

Thrust into the role, Ilham’s first task was to help broker the deal. Longtime SOCAR executive Khoshbakht Yusifzadehe later recounted that Ilham “soaked up information and details like a sponge and was pretty much up to speed on the salient issues within six weeks.” Many who worked with Ilham throughout this process, and indeed throughout his career, have described him similarly. SOCAR president Natig Aliyev (no relation) once reported that “if you tell President Ilham Aliyev something once, he retains it and, weeks later, he brings up any deviation if the same thing is explained again. He is a nuts and bolts man.”

On a visit to Houston, when the deal was finally supposed to be signed, Ilham demonstrated the skillful diplomatic instinct that would later come to characterize his tenure as president.

Negotiations were breaking down over disputes about drilling rights around the Caspian sea. Azerbaijan was demanding the existing terms established by Moscow; other Caspian states, such as Iran, wanted a revision into equal regions. Western companies told the Aliyevs that they would sign the deal only once the Caspian states had come to terms—effectively putting it on hold indefinitely. A $30-billion-dollar commitment and an immediate advance of hundreds of millions were on the line. Calling the Houston negotiating team, Heydar reportedly conveyed his and the country’s urgency: “We need schools. We need hospitals. And we cannot wait for some elongated negotiations on the Caspian that will ultimately make not one bit of difference to our territory.”

Big oil was firm, and the clause stayed. But so was Ilham, who went against his father’s wishes and decided to walk from the deal.

Under immense pressure to get Azerbaijan’s oil flowing, the Aliyevs moved to Plan B. Azerbaijan had no independent foreign policy to speak of during the Soviet era, and it was time for that to change. Heydar made a call to Washington to speak with the newly-inaugurated President Clinton. Having spent only seven months in office at that point, Clinton had already met several times with Azerbaijani ambassador Hafiz Pashayev. The president apparently had a solid grasp of the Caspian region’s main issues. Being the only country that shares a border with both Iran and Russia, cultivating Azerbaijan as an ally was a priority of U.S. foreign policy. Sensing their moment, the Aliyevs circumvented the Western oil companies and leveraged their recently-established ties with the U.S. government.

While Heydar and Clinton discussed terms, Ilham and the negotiating team were on a flight to Washington, where they met with U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary and convinced her of the propriety of a contract without the offending clause. Then, they flew right back to Houston. In the same board room, representatives of the U.S. oil companies announced that the federal government had convinced them to drop the clause. On September 20th, the deal was signed in Baku: SOCAR would hold a 20 percent stake in the new consortium that also included British Petroleum, Aramco, Russia’s Lukoil, Pennzoil, and others.

It was the beginning of a broader Azerbaijani strategy of investing in diplomatic ties with Western governments. This strategy has let Azerbaijan export oil and gas almost exclusively to the West ever since—the only state in the region with such privileges. They also circumvented both OPEC and Russian oil companies, thereby maintaining the country’s sovereignty. The strategy balanced Azerbaijan’s relationship with nearby Russia with close ties to the West.

Decades later, the Caspian states still haven’t come to a final agreement. Ilham’s gamble paid off handsomely.

De-Sovietizing the State

While Heydar had jump-started the country’s oil production with the help of his son, he had not managed to carry out state reform. Just like all post-Soviet republics, Azerbaijan inherited corrupt Soviet institutions and the corrupt officials who ran them. When Ilham was controversially elected in 2003 after his father’s death, he inherited that same Soviet husk.

Heydar, like so many apparatchiks, was betrayed by the Soviets after a lifetime of service to the regime. But Ilham’s early years suggest he always had an affinity for the West. He would turn out to be a true reformist. “It was uncertain at the time for [Ilham] Aliyev, whether he could stay on his feet,” Azerbaijani journalist Cavid Aga told me. “So he had to rely on Heydar’s apparatchiks.” But he was determined to forge his own legacy, and this reliance on the powerful old guard was short-lived.

As president, Ilham Aliyev embarked on a generational purge. He started spying on oligarchs and officials, banishing those caught red-handed engaging in corruption. By the end of the 2010s, Aliyev’s purge of the old guard was almost complete. But a few crucial figures still remained: one of these was his father’s second-in-command, Ramiz Mehdiyev. Ramiz was seen as a fifth column of the Russian regime within Azerbaijan. When Mehdiyev decided to flaunt the COVID rules and attend a wedding in 2020 while Azerbaijan was in lockdown, Aliyev seized on the opportunity. Mehdiyev was demoted from head of the presidential administration to head of the national academy and later stripped of all state responsibility.

Today, one of the only members of the old guard who remains is the current minister of emergencies, Kamaladdin Heydarov. “The rest are all completely defeated, or spending their last days in a resort in the UAE,” says Aga. “No one really knows what happened to them besides that they aren’t dead or in prison.”

Aliyev also used the pandemic to jail hundreds of functionaries belonging to the main opposition party, the Popular Front of Azerbaijan. Joining these political opponents in jail are hundreds of journalists, activists, and other opponents of the government from the last two decades. As of 2015, Azerbaijan had more than twice the number of political prisoners as Belarus and Russia combined.

Aliyev has supplanted those he purged with a team of English-speaking, Western-educated technocrats. “[It is] this inner circle that mostly decides on foreign policy. They are hawks that have all been educated in Turkey, the UK, or the U.S.,” says Aga.

Hikmet Hajiyev, one of Aliyev’s closest foreign policy advisors, is an archetypal example of the new generation. After studying international relations and law at Baku State University, Hajiyev obtained master’s degrees from NATO’s defense college in Rome and from the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. The latter is an institute run by the German and U.S. militaries. As the Head of the Foreign Policy Affairs Department of the Presidential Administration, he has proximity to power. But despite this, Hijayev is a presidential appointee that has no de jure decision-making authority. Hijayev’s role represents the ceiling faced by Aliyev’s new men in the Azerbaijani government.

Turkish and Western actors are thought to have played a significant role in curating this new class of advisors. “Aliyev brought them in as deputies first. Then he purged their superiors and had the deputies take their place,” Aga says. By ridding Azerbaijan of its Soviet cronies, Aliyev created a much more efficient state with a single hierarchy of effective political leadership. Aliyev’s selection for Western education does not just reflect a desire for competency; it buffers the influence that Russia once held over the old guard. What Aliyev has selected for, most of all, is loyalty to him personally. As far as power structures go, everything is centralized around him—especially in foreign policy.

Caviar Diplomacy and Palace Nepotism

Aliyev didn’t intend to root out corruption as such with his purges. While his father tolerated a certain degree of profiteering, Ilham Aliyev expects most corruption to flow through him and his family. “Heydar Aliyev maintained very tight control of corruption… he certainly wasn’t blatant about it in the way Ilham and his wife Mehribian and their respective families are today,” said Richard Kauzlarich, U.S ambassador to Azerbaijan from 1994 to 1997. In 1983, Ilham married Mehriban Pashayeva, whose grandfather was a famous Azerbaijani writer that already had amassed enormous wealth. He expanded the already-large Pashayev fortune by giving family members positions in government, which they have exploited for personal gain.

Ilham’s wife was made a member of parliament, and in 2009, a survey of journalists declared her, “the most active MP of 2009 in making legislative initiatives.” In 2017, Aliyev made her vice president of Azerbaijan. The extended family all have roles to play in maintaining Aliyev’s familial power. Nargiz Pashayeva, Aliyev’s sister-in-law, is the rector of Moscow State University’s Baku branch. His father-in-law, Arif Pashayev, runs the national aviation academy. Arif’s brother, Hafiz Pashayev, is a deputy minister of foreign affairs and served as U.S. ambassador for over 13 years. And so on it goes—the Pashayevs are now Azerbaijan’s most wealthy family by far. Their conglomerate, PASHA Holdings, owns seven of the ten largest banks in Azerbaijan, along with interests in tourism and insurance.

Aliyev faces little domestic resistance. This kind of nepotism is standard government procedure in modern Azerbaijan, as it was during Soviet times. Most dissidents know it’s best to keep their mouths shut and graciously accept the regime’s spoils. Those who don’t end up behind bars. Instead, it’s on the international stage where Aliyev faces substantial criticism, especially from enemy governments who might have the incentive to displace Aliyev’s favored position in the West.

To combat this, Aliyev has figured out how to manage his international detractors through intimidation and bribery. Azerbaijan manages a network of institutions whose purpose is to distribute funds throughout the West and ensure positive coverage in the media, allies in the business world, and defenders in politics. The network has been most active in Europe: in 2012, the European Sustainability Initiative used the term “caviar diplomacy” to describe Azerbaijan’s practice of bribing EU politicians. Doing state business in Azerbaijan is comfortable. The regime spends lavishly on hotel suites and dinners for its guests. Friendly journalists are offered access to Nagorno-Karabakh and other select locations. In 2017, Aliyev decided to give 255 loyal Azerbaijani journalists free apartments for their service to the regime.

But the real targets of Azerbaijan’s influence campaigns are politicians and business leaders who can use their positions to benefit the regime in more quiet ways. Focusing on mutual interests and quiet influence has brought the former Russian vassal wealth, power, and allies in the West and Asia to balance Moscow’s influence.

The same year Aliyev placated the journalists, the Pandora papers revealed a scheme in which the Azerbaijani government laundered $2.9 billion through four shell companies in the UK. Ali Nagiyev, who is responsible for battling corruption in Azerbaijan, was a “major user of the system.” According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, other recipients included “[a]t least three European politicians, a journalist who wrote stories friendly to the regime, and businessmen who praised the government… In some cases, these prominent individuals were able to mobilize important international organizations, such as UNESCO and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, to score [public relations] victories for the regime.” The European Sustainability Initiative described the scheme as the “biggest corruption scandal in the history of the Council of Europe.”

But these scandals haven’t damaged Azerbaijani relationships with Western capitals. Azerbaijan and the United Kingdom have a particularly warm relationship. British diplomats are the only ones in Baku who make the effort to learn Azerbaijani, and it was British Petroleum that won the contract to operate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. British mining giant Anglo American PLC has large investments in Azerbaijan and has benefited enormously from Azerbaijan’s victory in Nagorno-Karabakh, as mining sites were seized from the Armenians. Azerbaijan was even invited to take part in Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, in which she was gifted a rare Karabakh horse. In 2021, it was revealed that Aliyev and his family had a secret real estate portfolio in London worth an astounding $694 million.

Another one of Azerbaijan’s closest diplomatic relationships in the past decade has been with Israel—likewise known for its hard realism in diplomacy. In any future conflict with Iran, Azerbaijan’s airspace will be crucial for the Israelis, and a 2012 Wikileaks report showed that Israel has secret bases in southern Azerbaijan near the Iranian border. The strengthening of ties between Israel and Azerbaijan was encouraged by the United States, whose officials presciently theorized in the 1990s that “the Israel-Turkey-Georgia-Azerbaijan axis, supported by the US, would be a counterweight to the Syria-Iran-Armenia-Russia axis.” Israel supplies Azerbaijan with 69% of its imported weaponry, and Azerbaijan supplies Israel with 40% of its energy needs in return. As Israel’s most hardline government in recent memory gets to work, and as tensions with Iran continue to rise, Israeli-Azerbaijani relations continue to strengthen.

Western powers treat Azerbaijan as a strategically compatible partner in Eurasia similar to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Because of their oil wealth and military collaboration, the West turns a blind eye to social and political issues. As with the Saudi royal family, Aliyev rules like a de-facto monarch with unquestionable power. But compared to Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan is a far more palatable ally for Western powers—Aliyev knows how to tout Azerbaijan’s ostensible diversity, secularism, and nominally democratic institutions. But these are mostly a façade, and Aliyev isn’t afraid of being called corrupt, tyrannical, or malevolent because bodies like the European Court of Human Rights have no jurisdiction over him and his allies. Let the United Nations be “deeply concerned.” It makes no difference.

A Pan-Turkic Future?

Despite Aliyev’s multilateral balancing act, he has not completely secured Azerbaijan from foreign influence. Aliyev has bound himself to the hip with Erdogan and Turkey. One incident that illustrates this is the purge of Najmaddin Sadikov. Formerly the chief of staff of Azerbaijan’s armed forces under Heydar Aliyev, he had secured the position of deputy defense minister by 2020 in Ilham’s government. But in July, on the eve of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war, two high-ranking generals were killed in a border skirmish. Rumors quickly spread that Sadikov was responsible—that he had passed information to Russia, who subsequently notified the Armenians.

While the government formally backed Sadikov, rare protests were allowed in Baku that denounced him as a traitor. Once the war began, Sadikov disappeared from the public eye completely.  Bahtiar Ersay, head of the Turkish task force in Azerbaijan, is rumored to have been instrumental in Sadikov’s purge.

The extent of Turkey’s direct influence became most evident in 2020 when Aliyev initiated the reconquest of Karabakh. The region’s fate had loomed large in Aliyev’s mind for decades. “I talk about this issue every single day,” he told Graeme H. Wilson in his 2013 biography of the president. “One-ninth of the people in my country are internally displaced persons. That issue dominates my life.” At one point, Wilson asked Aliyev if Karabakh would be returned to Azerbaijan in his lifetime. “In my presidency,” he firmly replied.

On September 27th, 2020, Azerbaijan launched a full-scale invasion of Armenian-controlled Karabakh. Progress was slow at first—Armenia had been fortifying their defense lines since their 1994 victory. A previous Azerbaijani invasion in 2016 had met so little progress that it was called off after only four days. But by 2020, Azerbaijan had gained a qualitative military edge. Syrian mercenaries were hired to fight on the frontline, but even more important were the Turkish and Israeli weapons supplied in the run-up to the conflict.

The invasion also served as an acid test of Azerbaijan’s “caviar diplomacy” to shore up support abroad. British and EU politicians were a prime target. British MP Bob Blackman has taken seven free trips to Azerbaijan since 2011 worth tens of thousands of pounds. Shortly before the war in 2020, Blackman explained how he had been lobbied on the issue: 

One of the things that happens, I’m afraid, in these types of conflicts is that […] whoever gets the best propaganda tends to grab the attention of the listeners and the viewers… And in this regard I’ve been fed the information through the Azerbaijan embassy in the UK—so they’ve been very, very helpful, very, very proactive from the start.

Armenia’s international strategy was primarily one of advocacy; attempting to convince the world of its moral superiority in the conflict. But this paled in comparison to what Azerbaijan was able to accomplish with its powerful relationships. After Russia brokered a ceasefire on November 10, Armenia was forced to relinquish large swaths of territory in addition to what Azerbaijan’s military had acquired in battle. Russian peacekeepers soon swept through what was left of Armenian-controlled Karabakh.

Aliyev rewarded his Turkish allies with an open display of unity. After Azerbaijan’s victory in November, Erdogan and his army joined Aliyev in Baku. The two leaders gave a joint address, military bands played Ottoman songs, and the Turkish flag was just as omnipresent as the Azerbaijani. In his speech, Erdogan praised the Ottoman general Enver Pasha, known as the architect of the Armenian genocide. Aliyev declared that they would soon return to Armenia’s capital of Yerevan, which they claim as ancestral land. When Erdogan visited the newly recaptured city of Shusha (Shushi in Armenian), Aliyev announced that “Azerbaijan will create a smaller version of the Turkish military.” The two armies now effectively operate as a single unit in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Aliyev’s decision to bind Azerbaijan to Turkey on this institutional level also reflects its ideological dimension. The two nations are bound by the ethnic bond of pan-Turkism, which espouses unity between Turkey and the ethnically Turkic states in Central Asia. Turkey has aggressively promoted the concept in recent years and Azerbaijan has been very receptive. The alliance is mutually beneficial: Azerbaijan is the tip of the spear against Armenia, one of Turkey’s most hated enemies. During his rule, Heydar had once declared Azerbaijan and Turkey “two nations, one people.” At the time, it was mere sloganeering. Ilham is making that a reality.

As Russia became preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, Aliyev began to suspect that it would not be able to maintain its commitments in the region. On September 12, 2022, he put that theory to the test and launched an attack along Armenia’s eastern border, even firing on Russian military positions. Under Russia’s defense pacts with Armenia, it should have responded with military force. Instead, Russia did nothing. Aliyev proved that the security guarantee was worthless. Turkey, in contrast, has always come through for its ally.

Under the Aliyev family, the country went from being a Soviet oil vassal to carrying out acts of war against Russia with impunity and tacit Western backing. Aliyev has not yet exhausted his potential territorial gains. Russian peacekeepers still remain in Karabakh, and so far he has not been able to force the Zangezur corridor through southern Armenia, which would give Azerbaijan unfettered access to its exclave of Nakhichevan. But the war in Ukraine allowed Aliyev to secure Azerbaijan’s largest energy deal since his time as vice president of SOCAR in the 1990s. In July, he signed a deal with the EU that will double Azerbaijan’s gas exports to the region by 2027, further cementing Azerbaijan’s economic power. “He is like a cat that always lands on his feet,” says Aga. “He uses every opportunity to forward his strategic goals.” So far, the strategy continues to pay dividends. Azerbaijan and Aliyev are more powerful than ever before.

For months we had been reading intelligence assessments claiming an invasion was likely, even telling us the exact day. Each time, it would pass with no invasion. But tomorrow it’s really happening! No matter how convincing the intelligence and how clear the indicators were, there was an equally legitimate sense of incredulity. I didn’t expect to see any action in Kyiv, let alone from afar, so I was heading to the eastern city of Kharkiv to see things for myself. 

As I left, the ambient mood around me was anxious and uncertain. War would be terribly costly for Russia: a fractured Europe would unite, Russia would become a global pariah, foreign investment would flee, and sanctions would pile up. 

But with each passing day and escalation, it had been getting harder to argue Russia’s troop buildup was mere saber-rattling. Those who couldn’t bring themselves to predict a full-blown invasion had to gradually cede ground to the “alarmist.” At first, they chalked up Russia’s military buildup to being a means for coercive diplomacy, then a prelude to annexing the Donbas republics, and then it was preparation for a limited incursion in Ukraine’s east.

Just days before the full invasion, Russia moved troops into the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and officially recognized them as sovereign. In the early morning, the Russians evacuated their embassy in Kyiv. A plume of smoke could be seen from inside the walls as they destroyed sensitive documents. I wasn’t prescient enough to predict the scope of the coming “special operation,” but I did recognize there was no turning back.

Some friends were waiting for me in Kharkiv, and so I made my train and began to head east.

Just in Time for War

At 5 a.m. the next morning, I got a flurry of notifications—explosions could be heard in Kyiv, and firefights were reported on the border of Crimea. My friend Collin Mayfield, an American photographer who was already in Kharkiv, messaged me to say that he too was hearing explosions. I had expressed worry the day before when he told me that he booked a hostel right next to the train station. It was an escape route, but also a potential target.

I began to hear voices rippling through the train as, car by car, passengers began to hear the news. The invasion had begun. It was a horrifying but cathartic moment. The alarmists were right all along and I was serendipitously heading right towards the fire. Soon, everyone on the train was awake and glued to their phones. The mood was frantic but quiet. Ukrainians, especially those living in the east, had been ruminating over this possibility for a decade. Someone was listening to president Zelensky’s speech on their phone’s speakers. “I address all Ukrainians, and primarily Ukrainian servicemen, who have already taken the first enemy’s strike and are repelling it with dignity.”

When I arrived in Kharkiv, it was rush hour in the other direction. Thousands were frantically boarding what they thought would be the last train west. Collin and I made our way to the hostel, but they kicked us and all the other guests out as the owners fled town. We headed for the Kharkiv Palace Hotel, hoping for better luck. It was right next to several government buildings that were obvious targets for Russian strikes but there is no such thing as a risk-free decision.

The hotel was in pandemonium. At around 10 a.m., we received reports that Russian troops had surrounded Kharkiv. Terrified guests were scrambling to organize a ride, and gauging the best escape route. One media team from France wouldn’t take their local fixer, a previous Ukrainian military member who they feared might be on Russia’s “list,” and thus a liability should they be apprehended at a newly established Russian checkpoint. A number of people, mostly media, had made the call to stay as long as necessary.

For now, it was the right call. As the hours passed by, it increasingly became evident that we were not yet in danger. Battles were going on around the city’s outskirts, but the Ukrainians had repelled the Russians, who were only dug in on the northern front. I prepared my camera gear. A lot of those who remained planned to report on the war as well. WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram pumped in minute-by-minute updates on the situation. It’s a problem you quickly discover: even close to the action you still have to spend long stretches of time hunting for information, just like those watching from far away.

But our proximity was invaluable. While shelling continued, one sound was conspicuously absent—the sound of airplanes. Now should have been the moment when Russian air power swept in to establish dominance over the skies. But the moment never came.

It was one of the most inexplicable errors that the Russian army made at the beginning of their campaign. Instead of adequately softening up Ukrainian defenses with their artillery and other high-caliber weaponry, Russian forces relied on their armored divisions and infantry. Perhaps this was because the Russians wanted to avoid civilian casualties and damaging infrastructure, betting on a quick victory and a smooth integration of what they captured into the Russian Federation. It was a decision paid for in Russian blood.

Russia failed to employ several critical capabilities, most peculiarly, the Russian Air Force. The invasion started as any military analyst would expect, with large-scale pre-invasion strikes at dawn that destroyed Ukrainian early-warning radar systems. But Russia didn’t follow up with the logical next step, which would have been to obliterate the Ukrainian Air Force and establish air superiority from the onset. Why is hard to say—one theory is that Moscow was simply hubristic after taking Crimea with no blood spilled and outsourcing fighting to separatists in Donbas. But this campaign is far more ambitious, and the Ukrainians have had eight years to prepare.

The next day, Collin and I walked down to Freedom Square in central Kharkiv, which was nearly deserted. We were joined by Jack Crosbie from Rolling Stone and Jack Losh from Foreign Policy—it’s good to have numbers in these situations. Spring was in the air and shelling could be heard in the distance. In front of the central administrative building, members of the Territorial Defense Forces were pulling equipment from the trunk of someone’s sedan, loading magazines, and putting on their vests before heading to the front. A few civilian cars were frantically speeding around.

I met 80-year-old Alla Galakhtyonova just outside the local metro station at Freedom Square. She was trying to catch a cab that morning. She had just hitchhiked alone from Donbas. She was trying to reach her sister’s house just on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Thousands like Alla left their homes immediately, heading to another city that hadn’t yet come under siege, or as far west as they could. But for many residents of Kharkiv, leaving wasn’t necessarily the safest option. The metro station had been built during the Soviet era and designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Thousands of residents had been sleeping there every night since the invasion began.

Everyone was anxious to see what form the Russian campaign would take. How quickly would they move? Would Russian troops be launching strikes deep behind Ukrainian lines? What routes would they try to cut off? Complacency kills; whether in Kyiv, Kharkiv, or anywhere else along the line of contact, staying means assuming a risk.

On the 26th, we hired a driver named Vlad, who was willing to drive us to the frontlines. At a checkpoint near the outskirts of the city, we passed a car that had crashed into a concrete barrier. There were no visible gunshots on the windshield. Maybe the driver lost his composure amid the chaos, or had tried to dodge the checkpoint and lost control—it was hard to say. At every grocery store and bank, there were long lines of civilians queuing to get what they needed. Everyone nervously shuffled when a shell landed close. It was still a few kilometers away, but loud enough to terrify and powerful enough to shake the buildings.

On the outskirts of town, we arrived at a Ukrainian position. The Russians had just been stopped here, at an open intersection that cleanly separated the urban from rural. There was little cover. To our left and right, soldiers were hurriedly digging new trenches on the side of the highway. A fierce battle had just taken place and there was plenty of carnage to show for it. Russian uniforms and personal belongings were laying around a destroyed Russian tank, thrown out by soldiers as they scavenged through the wreckage. The Ukrainians appeared to have taken whatever they might need from inside, like ammunition and intelligence. Just up the street was a destroyed Ukrainian armored vehicle. Shell casings, unspent rounds, and other detritus were scattered everywhere. A charred helmet represented a likely casualty, but from which side was hard to say. A destroyed Russian APC was smoldering just behind it.

There was a mutilated, dead Russian soldier lying next to another destroyed APC. Crosbie approached the body to take a photo, coming to the horrifying realization afterward that he was walking on top of fresh snow, and had risked stepping on unexploded ordnance. Whenever possible, you want to walk on solid ground. Others cashed in on his recklessness and retraced his footsteps to get pictures; the Ukrainians appeared to have moved all the other bodies except for this one. A colleague found the reason after a close inspection: there was an unexploded RPG round leaning against his head.

The atmosphere was, if not calm, at least still. The city had been full of frantic energy as people made potential life or death choices. Out here, the soldiers had jobs to do, risk aversion only went so far as their duty permitted. They were digging trenches and checking their kit in diligent silence.

“Fin!” Crosbie yelled to me from down the road. Everyone was running to the trenches, and I sprinted back to join the group. The Ukrainians had just shelled Russian positions and were expecting a volley in return. We could have gone straight to the car and sped out of there, but the trenches were safest. When anticipating rocket or artillery attacks, you assume that direct hits are unlikely. The explosion goes up and outward, so it’s best to get as low as possible.

Luckily, our position was spared from counter-assault. Life on the front lines is often characterized by hours of silence followed by 5 minutes of intense, terrifying action. Soldiers are trained to hurry up and wait. We seized the opportunity to head back to Kharkiv.

On our way through the city, we stopped at the train station to talk with residents who were fleeing west. Most were heading to Lviv, and then into Poland. There was just one problem: Ukraine is built on the principle that all roads lead to Kyiv. Even though Kyiv was under heavy attack, everyone would have to go there first, then disembark and board a different westbound train. The news was spreading about crowds at the Polish border, though; some people told us they were trying their luck in Romania or Moldova instead. We knew that at some point soon, it was a decision we would have to make too.

Back at the Kharkiv Palace, war was no excuse for bad service. The wifi was working and Coronas still came with limes. Service was punctual, and the staff never showed any signs of fear or discomfort. Up in my room, a cheery advertisement for a local restaurant was playing on TV, as if nothing was awry and I could make a reservation that night if I wished. Maybe I should have. We met a man named Chris in the bar who claimed to know the mob ownership. He told us they had skipped town right before the war started, anticipating what was coming—or maybe even being tipped off. But before they left, they made sure the hotel was stocked with food for a month. The cooks were doing a fine job with it.

In the midst of it all, I got a notification on my phone: martial law was in full effect. Kharkiv Governor Oleh Synyehubov confirmed that all of Kharkiv was still in Ukrainian control and declared a 6 p.m. curfew. Any cars still on the street would be “liquidated.”

Civilian militias had already begun to patrol the streets, stopping anyone who was out in case they were saboteurs. For anyone still in the city, leaving had just become a lot harder. A convoy of territorial defense members loitered just outside the hotel, before speeding away to patrol the city. Heavy equipment and ambulances were moving north towards the front. At dusk, the shelling was sporadic, sometimes coming a little too close for comfort. Some people went to sleep in the basement or hotel lobby with their flak vests at arm’s length.

The patrols came thanks to military preparations Ukraine had made just weeks before the war began. On January 18th, the Ukrainian government officially expanded their Territorial Defense Forces, beefing them up to 25 brigades, made up of 150 battalions, plus volunteers. With each battalion consisting of up to 600 soldiers, the goal was to beef up Ukraine’s total reserves to 130,000 personnel just in time for the invasion. Many more have volunteered since the war began, with Ukraine claiming to seek 1.5-2 million. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are now a patchwork of regular military, police, loosely institutionalized territorial defense, and a variety of militias that aren’t formally incorporated into the command structure.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of videos that show Ukrainian paramilitary groups carrying out extrajudicial detainments, beatings, and torture. The method of choice is taping someone to a street pole and removing their pants. The transgressions? They range from cowardice, to looting, to being a suspected Russian saboteur. Due process is inefficient and costly in the midst of total war. I was detained four separate times during my time in Ukraine, by police, military, and territorial defense members. These recently deputized authorities were worried about journalists revealing troop positions or movements—a very legitimate concern.

By the morning of the 27th, we could hear gun battles for the first time in the city center. The Russians had broken through. Had we missed our escape window? “It’s too late, they’re in the city,” pronounced a photographer with The Washington Post as he put a croissant on his plate. We were all eating breakfast and weighing our options. At some point, we had to take a calculated risk and leave before this building became a target. The photographer may have been right, but I worried that our position in the city center was clouding our judgment. When we did eventually leave, I didn’t want to flee under heavy shelling. As the hours dragged by, the shooting began to grow fainter. Finally, the city went silent. I got a notification: “the Ukrainian Army has retaken Kharkiv!” In reality, they were only in the city for a few hours and so it was never under Russian occupation to begin with.

The Ukrainians had done something ingenious. They purposefully withdrew from their positions and allowed the Russians to move in. It was a trap, and after they had entered the city, the Ukrainians clobbered them from both sides.

This is a military tactic known as defense-of-depth, whereby you purposefully cede ground to the enemy, tricking them into overextending their supply lines and drawing them into a fortified position or trap. When a numerically superior enemy becomes overextended, their troops have to spread out and maintain the advances they’ve already made, considerably reducing their strength in numbers. Ukraine’s cities played a central role in this strategy. The attacker is at a distinct disadvantage in urban combat. Emile Guessen, a former British Royal Marines commando and journalist reporting from Kyiv, explained to me why:

The urban terrain reduces the attacker’s advantage in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. The defender can see and engage the attacker coming, because the attacker has limited cover and concealment and is often channeled. Buildings serve as fortified bunkers that must be negotiated by attackers. The defender maintains relative freedom of maneuver within the urban terrain.

That night, Collin and I wanted to check if we could see the explosions in the distance, and our friend Chris from the bar was willing to help. He knew the hotel inside and out and took us to a hidden staircase to the top floor. I pointed my camera north. We waited for the fireworks and had a few drinks. Below us, we noticed a police cruiser pull up to a stray man walking around past the curfew. He started running. Bad decision. The police raised their weapons. A single blast echoed up the building. Chris thought he’d been hit, but I wasn’t so sure. Was he a Russian saboteur? Probably not. But martial law is deadly serious, and this wasn’t the place to look for late-night shawarma. The next day in Kyiv, members of the Territorial Defense Units shot a civilian for violating curfew without thinking twice or giving him the benefit of the doubt. Allowing just about anyone to be armed and wield authority has had predictable consequences.

At around 5 a.m. on the 28th, the shelling began like clockwork. I had slept in the staircase to get the right shot. I put on my helmet, turned on my camera, and sprinted downstairs. For the past couple of days, Russian artillery and rocket fire had always started around this time.

Having lost momentum and taken heavy casualties, Russia gave up on trying to capture cities surgically and avoid civilian casualties. That explained the turn from incursions of gunfire to shelling from a distance that Kharkiv experienced. It’s much easier to defend a small number of bombing positions than to storm the city and fight block by block. The Russians meant to avoid constant close-quarters urban warfare.

Across all major fronts, it is Ukraine’s cities that have given the Russians the most trouble. During the storming of Mariupol, multiple ultimatums of surrender were rejected. Meanwhile, Kyiv is far from surrounded, and the Russians are stalled in the nearby towns of Irpin and Chernihiv. To the west of Irpin, on the other side of the Russian flank, Ukraine claims to have retaken the town of Makariv, allowing them to suffocate Russian supply lines. An assault on Odessa will have to wait, as Russian forces still haven’t taken the eastern adjacent city of Mykolaiv. Meanwhile, Ukrainians are continually reinforcing their cities. In Kharkiv, satellite imagery shows the Russians have finally dug in on the eastern flank, taking the M-03 and T-104 highways that lead into the city from that side.

Back in Kharkiv, the shelling was getting louder and closer, it was time to leave. I got a call from Jack: “Pack up. We got a ride, we’re out of here in five minutes.” We were joined again by Vlad, who supposedly knew a safe route south. We moved quickly and hit the road toward the city of Dnipro. Its central location has made it a temporary place of refuge for people fleeing from all the major fronts. Behind us, Kharkiv was being leveled. This was the beginning of the bombardment phase that would continue for over a month: “Everything from the center going northwards, just street after street is blown out,” journalist Neil Hauer later reported from the city. “The people we watched crawl out of the rubble today told us their relatives in Moscow didn’t believe them.”

Jack had planned to be right behind us. But as he was leaving in another car, the new reality came falling from the sky: “A shell landed just a few blocks away,” he later recounted. “Everyone ducked, stumbling. We scrambled out of the parked car and back into the hotel lobby…Ten minutes earlier, we had been the calmest we’d been in days.” Jack and his crew took momentary shelter, watching the skies, trying to guess at the best moment to make tracks. After several tense minutes, they rushed to their vehicle and hit the gas. Soon, they had made it out of the city.

A Long Road Ahead

Vlad wasn’t exactly sure where to go but seemed nonchalant. “There’s a Russian plane flying around this route, but apparently it’s just a UAV so it should be okay.” We passed around a dozen checkpoints between Kharkiv and Dnipro, manned by a mix of regular military and territorial defense units. At one, an older man with an 1800s-era percussion cap rifle worked in tandem with a guy in tactical gear wielding a modified AK-105. At another, hedgehog anti-tank obstacles were inscribed with the slogan, Путин—хуйло (Putin—dickhead). “He will never be able to shake this phrase. Putin will be known by these words for the rest of his life,” prophesied Vlad. If the Kremlin had really expected to be welcomed as liberators across swathes of the country, they made an enormous miscalculation.

The checkpoint outside Dnipro was reinforced particularly well. If Russia manages to push south through Kharkiv, west through Donbas, and north through Zaporizhzhia, one final bloody battle is likely to ensue for Eastern Ukraine in Dnipro. The city still hadn’t been hit by the time we arrived, but the air raid sirens were blaring.

Upstairs at our new hotel, a United Nations group gathered to plan civilian evacuations from Kharkiv. Downtown, territorial defense members were lined up outside a gun shop. We spoke with a father and son from Kharkiv who both had previous military experience and were preparing to enlist again. They had completed their years of combat under multiple different regimes. “I have a military education dating back to the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union,” recounted the father. ”And then I continued serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

At a volunteer center downtown, sandbags were being prepared, medical supplies gathered, and a large office team was working on logistics. “We have 100 volunteer cars ready. One thing we really need is body armor,” said one woman in military garb. Another woman who just moved from Kazakhstan asked if we could conduct our interview in the hallway instead of the room as it was safer in case of an airstrike. “I came from Almaty to help…There are many of us from different countries here,” she said. “We expect victory!” another volunteer told us, “There are no freer people than the Ukrainians.” The bombast was inspiring. But only time and blood will tell if morale translates into battlefield success. It was time for me to head west for Poland.

After a few days in Dnipro, Colin and I joined a bus full of refugees going to the Polish border on March 3rd. The 18-hour journey took us through country roads with dozens of checkpoints. At one, a soldier demanded that all men get out to have their papers checked. Not only were they worried about Russian saboteurs, but also-military aged Ukrainian men that might be trying to shirk duty. Driving through the center of Ukraine, far away from the line of contact, we passed town after sandbag-covered town preparing defenses.

At the Polish border, I waited in line with tens of thousands of people for 12 hours. I spoke to one man from Vietnam who went to university in Kharkiv. He, like most people, only had a few small bags. He left under heavy shelling and knew that carrying too much would only slow him down. Kharkiv was a thriving university city; those dormitories and faculty buildings are now mostly rubble.

Even if there was a ceasefire called tomorrow with favorable terms for Ukraine, the country has already been destroyed. It’s now estimated that 10 million people have fled their homes and 3.5 million have left the country. How many will return to their destroyed cities? Many will establish new lives in their new host countries. Ukraine already suffered from rampant corruption and economic stagnation before the war. Millions more will flee when they perceive it to be safe, or when they can escape from cities under siege, like Mariupol and Kharkiv. Few people without a deep connection to their homeland will be looking to move back anytime soon. Fewer will be clamoring to return if it means living under Russian occupation.

While the fighting rages on, death toll estimates are remarkably unreliable. Official government estimates should be taken with a large grain of salt, but Western analysts seem to be unquestioningly regurgitating Ukrainian government estimates—sometimes, just reposting data from Ukrainian military Facebook pages. These are bound to underreport Ukrainian casualties and overreport Russian ones.

Practical barriers to obtaining a reasonable casualty count also exist. One analyst turned combat volunteer for Ukraine who was on his way to Kharkiv—we’ll call him Jim—told me that he suspects there are at least 9,000 Ukrainian casualties. “It’s easier to account for regular Russian forces dying because we have their comm traffic and they’re all in uniform. Ukrainian casualties are a mix of regular military, which are well documented, Territorial Defense Forces, which are poorly documented, civilian militias, and civilian collateral damage, which is basically impossible to track in real-time.” In all likelihood, both Ukrainian and Russian casualties are colossal.

Jim was just one of a growing number of volunteers that Ukraine has managed to bring into its ranks. Not all are in it for moral support. While waiting in a Polish refugee processing facility, I came across some mercenaries who had just left Ukraine themselves. The Ukrainian government was demanding they sign an indefinite contract, to which the men refused. Perhaps this policy will change as the war gets more desperate for Ukraine. One of the men had previously completed 10 “contracts” with the Turkish Air Force, but wouldn’t elaborate on their nature.

We discussed the deteriorating security situation in Europe. “The Americans are flying B-52s through Belarusian airspace right now, intimidating the fuck out of Belarus,” the man claimed. Was it true? The deployment of strategic bombers is no trivial matter.

When it comes to escalation maybe it doesn’t matter. By March 3rd, 22,000 additional NATO troops had been moved into Eastern Europe. And the longer the conflict continues, the more room there is for serious error. In the early hours of February 24, the whole world became a far more dangerous place.

And then the storm vanished as quickly as it began. Only two weeks after the start of the protests, Russian peacekeepers were already departing from Almaty’s airport, which protestors had briefly seized on January 5. Despite the apparent calm, the country was gripped with confusion. The speed at which it all came and went just didn’t make sense. Senior figures were suddenly under arrest. Rumors spread about what battles were going on within the regime. I booked a ticket and went to figure things out for myself.

The government moved quickly to clean up Almaty, but hadn’t quite finished the job by the time I arrived. At Republic Square, which had seen some of the worst violence, broken decorations atop an archway swung in the breeze. Riot detritus had been casually swept beneath a tree. Young women were doing a photo shoot next to the broken glass. I was accompanied by my colleague, Aziz, a local who had seen the events unfold. As we observed a construction crew at work in Almaty’s torched city hall, I remarked to him how surprised I was at the speed at which orderly society had resumed.

“Right around the corner here, protesters were storming the presidential residence with hunting rifles they got from gun shops,” Aziz told me. “And the defending guards were shooting them with rubber bullets…you should have seen it, man, it was impressive.” Maybe something had been lost in translation, or maybe he was being sarcastic, but he wasn’t lauding the violence. One of his friends, a cameraman, was killed when the riots heated up.

A mile away, an authorized protest had gathered outside the National Academy of Sciences. The police monitored the assembly from the rooftop, concealing their weapons and avoiding the optics of armed ground-level security. Facial recognition cameras took attendance.

A speaker draped in the Kazakh flag took to the podium to address the crowd. “Tomorrow, we must have new presidential elections. From the beginning, Tokayev acquired his position illegally,” he declared. “We must take control of the election commissions!” As the speech wound down, I asked one young demonstrator what he wanted the government to know. “I want the government to be responsible for the innocent people who were killed,” he replied. “For the women and children who were just out on the streets, for those who were arrested and tortured, for those who were taken out of hospitals!”

Three forlorn women displayed photographs of their sons who were arrested earlier that month. A young boy walked into the frame in the middle of our interview and started to caress one of the pictures. One of the mothers, Zhanar, explained: “That’s his nephew. He thinks he’s dead.” She said their sons had their car commandeered by armed men, who then forced them to remove their license plate and go to a gun shop. “Those people loaded the stolen guns into their car, and drove together with our children to the square. From there, people took the guns out of their car, and then our children ran away.” Zhanar insisted that they weren’t participants from the onset. “On January 4th and 5th, our children were working…” She was shocked to get a call at 1 a.m. the following day from her son as he sat in jail. He was asking for a lawyer.

Later that week, at Kazakhstan’s border service academy, I interviewed the cousin of a slain soldier named Zhandos. He, along with Zhandos’s widow, had just laid flowers at the spot inside the compound’s walls where he was fatally shot. Zhandos had called his mother the night before the attack, told her he would dress warmer, and that everything would be fine. This wasn’t an exceptionally dangerous military post, his cousin explained to me, and nothing foreshadowed such serious trouble. The violence came as a shock to nearly everyone.

Strange Beginnings

When speaking to people in Kazakhstan about the protests, the common sentiment among both supporters and opponents was a shared suspicion about how suddenly violence had erupted and how quickly the riots had grown.

This wasn’t the first time the country had seen protests. In 2019, Tokayev began his tenure as president after decades in the highest levels of government under Nur-Sultan Nazarbayev, who had ruled the country since 1990. Among the establishment, he had long been seen as a potential successor—but also a fairly nominal one, with Nazarbayev and his family still pulling the strings. The transfer of power sparked controversy among long-time opponents of Nazarbayev’s government, who organized nationwide protests. Despite a harsh crackdown, not a single death was recorded as a result. Smaller outbursts of violence had occurred prior to this. In 2011, security forces opened fire on striking oil workers in the city of Zhanaozen, killing 17.

The riots which engulfed the country in January also started as a working-class protest in Zhanaozen. The prelude to it all was a government decision on the price of fuel. On January 1, Kazakhstan lifted price controls on liquified petroleum gas (LPG), calling them financially unsustainable. Prices doubled overnight. Protests broke out the following day.

But almost overnight, the movement had morphed into a general anti-government grievance campaign. By January 4th, 5000 demonstrators had gathered in Kazakhstan’s former capital and largest city, Almaty. “Old man, go away!” they chanted, referring to Nazarbayev. Despite having stepped down as president, he still wielded significant power as head of the Security Council of Kazakhstan, an advisory body to the President on military matters. This ended up being a turning point in the narrative of the protests. As people returned to the streets the following day, the mood had changed from optimistic to militant.

No one I spoke with believed that a dispute over fuel prices, or agitation for new elections, really lay behind the sudden turn. Lebanon, which boasts some of the highest fuel prices in the world and a total economic collapse, has seen no protests of a magnitude like those in Kazakhstan. Nor was it inevitable that lingering Soviet-era influences would inevitably translate into a harsh crackdown. Ukraine, a fellow post-Soviet state, underwent the 2014 Euromaidan protests just several years earlier. During those protests, intense battles between rioters and police went on for weeks before live ammunition was used. The death toll of Euromaidan was 130 casualties. The toll for Kazakhstan’s “January Rebellion” was nearly double.

What happened is mysterious, but not inexplicable. One consistent pattern reported during these later protests was the absence of Kazakhstan’s national security services and police as things became violent. On January 5th, journalists Almas Kaisar and Dmitry Mazorenko reported that this unresponsiveness made it impossible to verify the rumors of killings. No one would pick up the phone at the city police department. The internet was switched off nationwide, making it very difficult for local residents to understand what was going on.

I spoke with a local named Roman Ivanov, who recalled there being no police for three days: “Almaty was abandoned…We organized patrols in the streets on our own. The men came out and we took the hunting rifles that we had. So we guarded our houses ourselves.” Without resistance from the state, organized groups of heavily armed men overtook the airport. They stormed the mayor’s office, set ablaze the state broadcasting corporation, president’s residence, and prosecutor’s office. They raided a police armory, stealing high-caliber machine guns and explosives.

Seemingly unable to trust his own forces, Tokayev called upon the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to intervene. The alliance acceded to his request, and about 3600 troops from Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia arrived on January 6th. With CSTO troops protecting strategic locations, Tokayev gave new orders to the local police: shoot to kill without warning. The demonstrations were ruthlessly suppressed.

One day earlier, Tokayev had also made the politically explosive decision to remove Nazarbayev from the Security Council. After 29 years as president of Kazakhstan, and two years as “father of the nation,” Nazarbayev found himself dethroned by his former protégé, once viewed as a merely nominal successor.

Tokayev then arrested Karim Massimov, who had been head of the country’s National Security Committee—an intelligence agency focused on Kazakhstan’s borders—but was fired from this post the same day as Nazarbayev’s removal. A close associate of Nazarbayev, Massimov now found himself charged with treason. Deputies Anuar Sadykulov and Daulet Yergozhin were also charged.

Just nine days of upheaval ended 30 years of relative peace in a country lauded for stability among its post-Soviet peers.

Aftermath

“When Massimov was arrested, [members of the security service] didn’t know what to do,” Kazakhstani human rights lawyer Aiman Umarova told me. “They were waiting, and didn’t know who to receive orders from.”

I met with Umarova after hearing about her work initiating the creation of an independent, bipartisan commission called Amanat (“Duty”) to investigate the January unrest. It includes human rights activists and criminal lawyers, but also representatives from both the Prosecutor General’s office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Kazakhstan’s Secretary of State has voiced support for the commission, indicating it could be able to influence the outcome of criminal cases. While more stridently anti-government committees exist to do similar work, it’s unlikely they will gain the same level of favor with the state.

In her office, Umarova sat at the head of a table while family members gathered around to plead their case. She later told me she sleeps about 3 hours a night. On her wall were photos of her with Melania Trump, who presented her the International Woman of Courage Award in 2018, and one with Tokayev himself. Among the attendees were the three mothers I met at the demonstrations earlier that week. I asked what they’ve heard since, and they told me that while their lawyer said their boys weren’t being tortured, they hadn’t been able to see their sons and confirm things for themselves. Also in attendance was one of the fathers, who was having a tense exchange with Umarova. He was insistent their sons were innocent. But, Umarova explained, the commission is bound by due process. “This must be confirmed by the investigation first.” The exasperated father kept a diplomatic stance. “Ms. Umarova, please excuse us. We are so tired.” Umarova was sympathetic to their cause, but it was only one of well over a hundred cases she sorts through each day.

Umarova took on their case because the story of these three young men was unique. “They were forced by armed people to go to the square,” she said. “It’s natural that they were arrested.” Umarova considers their alibi—that they only went to the square and gunshop under duress—as possible evidence of more violent extremist activity among a subset of demonstrators. By distinguishing regular protestors from these elements, she hopes Amanat can act as a legal advocate for those who attended the protests with peaceful intentions. “Some [who were arrested] say they were just watching,” she said. “Others say they came to participate but didn’t know the plans that others had…there were people who used this peaceful demonstration so that if they were shot by police they could say, ‘See, the police are shooting at innocent people!’ And if the police don’t shoot, they will shoot at the police.”

By January 9th, order had been restored to most of Kazakhstan, although some clashes were reported between security forces and demonstrators that night. On January 10th, the internet came back on, and social media was flooded with videos from the past week. Desperate people were posting pictures of their family members, unsure if they were in prison or among the dead.

The vast majority of protestors killed or currently behind bars didn’t know they were participating in a “terrorist plot.” But a critical mass of insurrectionists gave ample justification for the state to arrest just about anyone. From the government’s perspective, mingling with people shooting at the police is probable cause. Umarova believes that a number of the protests had telltale signs of planned violence: “Peaceful rallies don’t only consist of men. But here the majority were men, a lot of men. During a peaceful rally, there aren’t men who can shoot, fight, and so on. During this ‘peaceful’ rally, the security guards were instructed by a call to leave, and then [militants] entered the airport. Is this a peaceful rally?”

What did she think about the accusations from government officials about foreign involvement in the protests? “I think that there was an order, and that external forces were involved as well,” she said. “But here’s the thing: by saying external forces I don’t mean the Taliban, or anything like that. I mean [Kazakhstani] citizens. [The militants] were our people who were abroad and were given an order.” Who did she think had the capacity to give orders like this? “The situation is very complicated now… not only are oligarchs involved, but our security services as well.” She paused for a moment. “The most frightening thing is that the Almaty Department of the National Security Committee left us alone [during the demonstrations] and went elsewhere. This is a betrayal, and this fact must be investigated too.”

It’s often hard to discern the particular factional lines within Kazakhstan’s small and insular elite. But Tokayev’s decision to remove Nazarbayev and then arrest Massimov so early on signals that he perceived the threat to be internal. On January 13th, the CSTO announced that their withdrawal was underway, and all CSTO forces had left Kazakhstan by the 19th. CSTO troops were assigned to the protection of critical infrastructure but never fired a shot, nor did they report any injuries or damaged equipment. After Massimov’s firing, the domestic security services, and the military seem to have obeyed Tokayev’s orders. Once they were properly mobilized, the protests were quickly crushed—another sign that decisions to fall back and abandon key locations to violence may have been intentional. For those wavering in loyalty to Tokayev, the intervention was a clear message: if necessary, the government would be propped up with Russian arms.

Tokayev himself blamed the events on 20,000 “bandits” and “terrorists,” and spoke about a “single center” of organization. Despite these ongoing allusions to foreign involvement, Kazakhstan’s government has been less than clear about where the terrorists originated from.

On January 9th, Kazakhstan’s state broadcasting corporation, which was nearly burned to the ground earlier that week, aired an interview with one of the alleged terrorists. His face scratched and bruised, the man confessed: “On [January 1], unknown people contacted me and offered me 90,000 tenge [about 205 U.S. dollars] to take part in meetings [in Kazakhstan]. And since I’m unemployed in Kyrgyzstan, I agreed.” But after the video made the rounds online, the man was identified as Vikram Ruzakhunov, a Kyrgyz jazz musician that frequents Kazakhstan for gigs—certainly not unemployed. The government of Kyrgyzstan demanded his release, and he was transferred to Bishkek on January 10th. In a later Instagram post, Ruzakhunov offered a sardonic thanks to the state broadcaster for making him their showcase terrorist, thus alerting his friends and government to his illegitimate capture.

The outsized violence, given the original intentions of the protests, is what feeds accusations of foreign involvement, including by senior government leaders. As protests unfolded, both locals and foreigners speculated about Western or even Turkish infiltration. Those who supported this theory could point to the presence of several Western NGOs in Kazakhstan. Most commonly invoked were the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S.-funded NGO which opponents have long labeled a CIA front, and the Open Society Foundations in Kazakhstan.

While these organizations have long been the target of Russian scrutiny—Russia banned the NED as an “undesirable” NGO in 2019—it’s not clear whether these rumors fed into Moscow’s rapid response. More certain is that the events that followed Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests a few years earlier likely occupied the minds of Russian leaders. Moscow’s late response to the Euromaidan movement ultimately resulted in the toppling of a pro-Russian government and the ascendency of a pro-Western, pro-NATO government in Kiev. This time, Kazakhstan’s Russian allies acted swiftly, immediately acceding to Tokayev’s request and putting boots on the ground. 

War Within the State

There seems little reason to doubt that the original protests in Zhanaozen were an authentic, bottom-up protest from workers and residents who were upset with fuel prices. But as events spiraled, an element existed that knew where to find weapons, was willing to use them and proficient in doing so, and likely had ties to the security state. The protests appear to have been an opportunity to attempt a coup against Tokayev’s government, or to create the conditions for others to do so. The initial pattern of police standing down and retreating seems too widespread to be a momentary decision undertaken by lower- or middle-ranking officers.

In a video from January 5th, people can be seen snatching up rifles offloaded by a truck. Some were likely convinced on the spot to grab one of the firearms being handed out, but who was responsible for acquiring them? According to Almas Kaisar and Dmitry Mazorenko, men with firearms, rather than peaceful protestors, noticeably dominated the streets that evening:

People in military or police uniforms appeared in the crowd. On social media, eyewitnesses reported rumors that individual police and military officers had gone over to the side of the protesters. They shared their equipment with other demonstrators to make them stand out less in the crowd, observers believed. We could not confirm how reliable this information is.

 

Some demonstrators aroused indignation and fear among other protesters by their appearance: it was easy to mistake them for adherents of radical religious movements. A bearded man with a travel bag was surrounded and asked to show the contents of his bag. “Is he not a Wahhabite [a follower of a fundamentalist movement within Sunni Islam]? What is he carrying?” people asked. There was nothing serious in the bag, however. In total, about ten men with beards were found in the march.

 

The violence and attacks on government buildings began that same night. Similar reports paint a clear picture of the distinction between the peaceful protestors and factions of insurrectionists. Eyewitnesses reported that the protestors participating in violence and property destruction seemed to wear similar black jackets and carry identical masks and other gear. While some proposed that they had come from poorer districts in Almaty, this doesn’t explain the coordination of the attacks on critical government infrastructure. It also doesn’t account for security forces falling back during those attacks, despite showing the capability to successfully use force later on, after Tokayev took control of the security state.

While it’s currently difficult to identify who was behind these insurrectionist factions, some clues exist in the actions that Tokayev and his allies undertook within the state itself.

Throughout the last 30 years, Nazarbayev used his time in power to tighten his grip over the state and take control of the natural resources that are the basis of political power. As reported by the political consulting firm Bismarck Analysis, he gave members of his family control over state industry and appointed them to key positions in government. He appointed his son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, as head of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, and began appointing provincial governors rather than continuing elections. The overall impact of his actions was to undermine and remove the Soviet-era elite that had previously governed Kazakhstan and replace them with a tighter inner circle. 

In 1995, Nazarbayev’s daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, founded the Khabar group, a conglomerate that was given control of 80% of the country’s media. Nazarbayeva stepped down in 2003 to run for political office and held various government positions over the next decade. In 2015, she was appointed Deputy Prime Minister, a move perceived to be part of Nazarbayev’s succession plans. After Tokayev took power in 2019, Nazarbayeva was appointed Chair of the Senate, and was widely expected to eventually assume the role of President. Tokayev was himself perceived to be a placeholder. 

But after serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chair of the Senate twice, and as Prime Minister, Tokayev wasn’t satisfied with the mere illusion of power. In May 2020, Tokayev asserted himself by removing Nazarbayev’s daughter from the Senate entirely.

This betrayal by a former protégé was only the latest of a great number of cracks that had formed in Nazarbayev’s inner circle over the years—including within his own family. His most notable antagonist turned out to be another son-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev. Aliyev married Dariga Nazarbayeva in the 1990s; with her, he shared in the wealth and power of the state. But as his star rose, he began his own plots to usurp control of Kazakhstan. 

According to a document leaked by Wikileaks, U.S. diplomat Richard Hoagland recounted discussions with Zharmakhan Tuyakbay, then-leader of the Nationwide Social Democratic Party. According to Tuyakbay, Aliyev was conspiring to take Nazarbayev’s position by force:

According to Tuyakbay, when Aliyev was deputy chairman of the Committee for National Security (KNB) at the beginning of this decade, he asked Nazarbayev for permission to wire-tap all senior officials and financial oligarchs, telling Nazarbayev it was a way to protect him. However, Nazarbayev eventually learned that the “extremely ambitious” Aliyev had tapped him, too, and was building a collection of “kompromat” to use eventually to displace Nazarbayev and install himself as president. Nazarbayev “soft-exiled” Aliyev to Vienna as ambassador to get him out of his hair, but Aliyev started leaking his “kompromat” against Nazarbayev, which led to their total rupture. According to Tuyakbay, this was the beginning of when power began to ebb slowly away from Nazarbayev. According to Kazakh cultural tradition, Nazarbayev lost face because he could not control his own family. This loss of face has begun to convince others that Nazarbayev is not eternal and omnipotent. 

In 2007, Nazarbayev put out an international arrest warrant for Aliyev for money laundering and kidnapping. He died in an Austrian prison in 2015, allegedly by suicide—an autopsy result that was later contested. 

No sooner was Aliyev out of the picture than a new familial antagonist emerged. In 2020, Dariga Nazarbayeva and Aliyev’s son, Aisultan, began making startling accusations against his family on Facebook. Among the accusations was that Nazarbayev was actually his father and that his mother was trying to assassinate him while he was living in London. He also alleged that Nazarbayev was sponsoring armed Salafist groups, “hidden in forests and mountains.” Former National Security Committee chairman Alnur Mussayev, who had close personal ties to the family, later confirmed that Aisultan was not Aliyev’s biological son—though he would not reveal the real father’s identity. Aisultan himself died in London in August 2020 after years of drug addiction, with a British coroner identifying a heart attack as his cause of death.

In the wake of these events, Tokayev’s moves against Nazarbayev’s inner circle threatened his increasingly fragile hold on political power and succession. But as the protests began, Nazarbayev and his family still controlled Kazakhstan’s security state. Nazarbayev himself remained chairman of the Security Council. His nephew, Samat Abish, sat as Deputy Chairman of the National Security Committee. By the end of January 2022, Tokayev had successfully purged them both—along with Nazarbayev’s son-in-law Kulibayev, who had become chairman of the National Council of Entrepreneurs.

While the familial intrigue and factional divides provide a good explanation as to the cause of the infighting, the question remains of just who could have acted as an insurrectionist force on the streets.

A few weeks after the uprising, I joined a group of locals on a mountain climbing expedition just outside of Almaty. The man responsible for organizing the trip was a keen outdoorsman in his early 40s to whom the events of January had come as no surprise. “I knew these events were going to happen because a policeman friend had told me about it,” he said. “But they expected it in December.” I asked him what he made of Aisultan’s claims about Nazarbayev secretly training Salafists. “In the mountains, there are places to which access is closed. I know this because I can travel,” he replied. “Rangers and foresters say they have seen such groups. I know that there are many Salafists and other movements that have been coming to our city and outskirts for several years.” 

This, I later learned, was more than an outdoorsman’s tall tale. Former Nazarbayev advisor Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, a recent defector to Tokayev, recently made similar claims of Salafist training camps in the region. While the state officially opposes Salafist activities, such groups maintain a presence both in the criminal underworld and in Almaty itself—in particular, one Saudi-funded “cultural center” in the city has escaped the shutdowns enforced against other Salafist institutions and camps. The nearby mountain range of Trans-Ili Alatau is also a fertile ground for Salafist activity and training camps. Over the course of August 2011, alleged Islamists killed 11 people who had happened upon their base where they had been living with their wives. 

A press release by the government on the 14th of January reported that a group of armed men was arrested in Zailiysky Alatau. They wore long beards in styles associated with conservative schools of Islam, something prohibited by law in Kazakhstan due to its Salafist connotations in the region. Elsewhere, a member of the banned Islamist group Tablighi Jamaat was detained, also bearing weapons. All of these men are suspected to have participated in the protests and subsequent looting of Almaty. Non-religious elements of the criminal underworld, including cattle thieves, were also arrested in connection with the protests.

The relationship between Nazarbayev family members and Kazakhstan’s radical Salafist movement is hard to plot, but one more notable figure stands out: Kairat Satybaldy, brother of Samat Abish. Like Abish, Satybaldy has previously served on the National Security Committee. He is also widely regarded as a Salafist sympathizer with ties to the movement’s radical underbelly. His close ties to the ruling family and personal wealth made him a powerful patron. According to accusations from rival politicians and local media, he used this position to keep state pressure off favored Salafist groups.

Together, Abish and Satybaldy appear to have operated at the intersection of state power with Kazakhstan’s underworld. Felix Kulov, former Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, spoke openly in a now-deleted Facebook post about the reputation of both men for political intrigue and illicit wealth:

It’s no secret that Samat [Abish], together with [Nazarbayev’s] other nephew, Kairat Satybaldy, controlled many markets and, in particular, the one located at the exit from Almaty towards [the Kyrgyz capital of] Bishkek. They controlled the markets through criminal structures, which, in turn, controlled those who worked for them.

 

[…]

 

It was reported that the leaders of the [National Security Committee] of Kazakhstan, Massimov and Samat Abish, organized camps to train militants to use them against [Nazarbayev’s] political opponents. In particular, one of the methods: to use “bearded men” against other “bearded men,” according to the principle of “knock out with a wedge.”

If Kulov is right about the extent of pre-existing ties between Nazarbayev family members, criminal organizations, and Salafist radicals, then Abish or other allies may well have chosen to mobilize such forces against the political threat of Tokayev.

Ironically, it might be Tokayev’s own accusations of 20,000 “bandits” that make these stories hard to reconcile. The government’s incentive is to maximize the accusations of foreign or terrorist involvement. The reality is that none of these events would have been possible without authentic participation by huge numbers of locals with grievances, whether real or perceived.

But with this in mind, a much smaller number of violent agitators could have made a real difference in the dynamic and intensity of the protests. A few hundred mobilized insurrectionists—particularly ones with ties to Abish, Satybaldy, or other members of the Nazarbayev clan—make sense in a way that tens of thousands don’t. Kulov himself points out that the 1999 invasion of Kyrgyz Republic territory by only “200-300” Islamist militants nearly resulted in conscription measures.

With Massimov expected to go on trial soon, this seems as good a time as any for Tokayev’s faction to publicize any information about Nazarbayev family ties to militant groups. Whether they choose to do so will largely depend on what deals get made in the backrooms. While Tokayev has fired Nazarbayev relatives from positions of power, he has not arrested them—sparing them the fate of powerful figures who found themselves purged, such as Massimov.

The explanation for Tokayev’s restraint in dealing with his predecessor’s family seems simple: the purges, so far, have worked. Prominent figures within Kazakhstan have already fallen in line and officials continue to distance themselves from the old order. “Negotiations are ongoing, but it is clear the Nazarbayev era is over,” Yertysbayev said in an interview given shortly after his political defection. “Many people are moving from the Nazarbayev camp to the side of President Tokayev.” Undue aggression at this stage could upset this balance, making other potential defectors worried about their future.

Tokayev also seems to have won on the front of international patronage. Before the uprising, but after Tokayev had removed Nazarbayeva as chair of the senate, Vladimir Putin appeared to recognize Tokayev’s position as well. At a meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States in 2021, Tokayev and Nazarbayev traveled on different planes. Putin was observed to have devoted far more time to Tokayev, perhaps realizing the new leader held legitimate power and Nazarbayev’s succession plan had gone awry. The current situation may be unfortunate for Putin himself, who was rumored to be looking at the “Nazarbayev Option” for his own succession—relinquishing his formal powers and day-to-day management of the country, but retaining ultimate power.

Tokayev himself is expected to give an update on January’s events in the coming months. If he chooses to speak publicly about internal state support for the protests and break from the claims about “foreign terrorists,” it could occur then.

Since the protests ended, he has ramped up his own rhetoric against Kazakhstan’s oligarchs and the privileges they received under Nazarbayev. For now, he has a firm hand on the levers of state power and appears to have disciplined his security forces. Nazarbayev himself seems pacified, and remains conspicuously absent from the public eye. For those among Kazakhstan’s elite who were slow to get the message, the rapid CSTO intervention at Tokayev’s request has left no debate as to who Moscow is doing business with.

But Kazakhstan’s president stands in a similar position to Nazarbayev himself in 1991—control over a political landscape still dominated by those who rose under his rivals. Whether Tokayev keeps his position will depend on more than consolidating Nazarbayev’s disloyal allies. The question now is whether he can outdo his predecessor in building up a new generation of statesmen in Kazakhstan.

Reminders of the disaster still surround the city. When you drive into Beirut in the middle of the night, the silhouette of a grain silo rises up ominously next to the seaside highway. When the explosion happened, that silo saved thousands of lives by absorbing the blast. To the right of the highway, massive banners with political slogans are brightly lit up and draped over skyscrapers still hollowed out by the explosion. They stand out next to the eerily dark city created by Lebanon’s acute electricity crisis. When the sun sets, it’s as if Beirut falls into a coma.

The banners are just one example of the kind of dystopian iconography that covers downtown Beirut. Written in both English and Arabic, they say things like “You’ve lost your immunity,” and “Hostages of a murderous state!” All are messages directed at Lebanon’s entrenched political class, which has a reputation for corruption that is notorious even in the Middle East, where it’s often just how business is done. Vandals paint the hammer-and-sickle, and sometimes the swastika, on the downtown walls; stars of David frequently mark the trash cans. Some places even have scars from the civil war of 30 years ago. One such building is the Holiday Inn in Hamra, once the city’s crown jewel of a neighborhood. The hotel now serves as the Lebanese military’s main outpost in the district.

Adjacent to the port is Beirut’s civic center, Martyrs’ Square, where most of the anti-government demonstrations took place during the October Revolution of 2019. While the protests were characterized by unprecedented cross-sectarian participation, they were rudderless, desperate, and ultimately futile. The political fallout forced Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign, but the ensuing year was characterized by both Hezbollah and Western NGOs plugging the holes of a useless caretaker government, with Hezbollah—and by that proxy, Iran—emerging as the de-facto ruling authority. Subsequently, perceiving a state under total Iranian capture, almost all of the Arab Gulf states have found pretexts to cut diplomatic ties with Lebanon.

Those with means are fleeing Lebanon in massive numbers. Those still here, almost universally out of necessity, are just waiting it out: some wait for next spring’s elections, and others for the new government to secure an IMF bailout. Any morsel of good news helps at this point. Some still have faith in Lebanon prevailing, at least in the long term. The region in which modern Lebanon is situated has been a trade hub since Biblical times. It is a crucible that allows for the exchange of capital and culture between the Middle East and Europe. It has patronage and stakeholders from the Sunni, Shia, and Christian worlds, all of whom have an interest in Lebanon’s revival, at least in their image.

But Lebanon is a failed state, and no amount of promising geopolitical advantages make up for the infrastructure of a functional state. In the short term, everyone is bearish on Lebanon. It faces the possibilities of partition, conservatorship, war, or some mix of the three. This is a country far past the point of managed decline. The question is whether someone can still manage a crash-landing before it’s too late to pull out of the nosedive.

Lebanon’s Deindustrial Disaster

On my first day in Lebanon, I asked my friend Garo, a Lebanese-Armenian consultant, if there were any protests I should go to cover. “I don’t think so, the ratio of partying to protests here is like 1000:1.” Nihilism has swept over Lebanon’s youth, who have lost all faith in a government that can’t perform the basic functions of civil society. What I really needed to see, Garo determined, were the remnants of Beirut Souks. It’s the city’s once-bustling commercial center which sits adjacent to Martyrs’ Square. It was here that Lebanon’s elite, diaspora, and affluent tourists used to shop for luxury imported goods. We found the district completely deserted, with unaffordable shopping centers standing empty, damage littering the area, and revolutionary graffiti from the protests which had now long ceased.

Down the street from the abandoned shopping strip is the corpse of a construction project named the North Souks Department Store, designed by the famed late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, known for her conspicuous and surrealist designs. The fact that Beirut managed to snag two of her projects was once proof of its affluence. Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, where she has another building. AUB is one of the most prestigious universities in the Middle East. Its alumni include seven Jordanian prime ministers, a CEO of Saudi Aramco, an Israeli Supreme Court judge, an American ambassador to the United Nations and Afghanistan, and many of Lebanon’s most important faces. Unfortunately for Beirut, the North Souks Department Store went up in flames in September 2020, just over a month after the port explosion. Since then, it has instead become a monument to the suspicion, corruption, and conspiracy that maintains the ongoing dysfunction of Lebanese politics.

How the fire started is a mystery. Many people suspect insurance fraud: why did the building burn on opposite sides and yet not through the middle? Arson seems like the only explanation. There is no suspect with a more obvious motive than the company that owns the project: Solidere. The company began as a real estate development firm, created in 1992 with a mandate of rebuilding Beirut after the civil war.

The largest shareholder at the time of inception was the newly-elected prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Hariri expropriated massive amounts of land from Solidere’s previous owners and unfairly compensated them below-market rates. He embarked on a project to make central Beirut an attractive destination for the international elite, supplanting the pre-war cultural foundations for expensive venues and postmodern architecture. This hyper-commodified vision for central Beirut was similar to that of Dubai, which was also a massive parking lot at the time. But while Dubai could be marketed as a global city rising out of the desert, many Lebanese saw the commercialized rebuilding as an insult to their cultural and historical distinction.

A businessman with dual citizenship in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, Rafik Hariri soared to Lebanon’s highest political office after playing a key role in negotiating the Taif Agreement that ended the civil war. He sought to return Lebanon to its pre-civil war glory as the Paris of the Middle East, a commercial hub on the eastern Mediterranean that would attract investment with banking secrecy, scant regulation, and liberal social laws that allowed rich Arabs to participate in Western-style debauchery without persecution. Hariri quickly signed a series of free trade agreements with the European Union, Syria, and joined the Arab common Market (GAFTA).

Removing barriers to import had the result of sidelining Lebanon’s powerful industrialists and turning Lebanon into a service economy. The majority of industrialists at the time when Hariri took power were Maronite Christians, while the Sunnis, represented by Hariri’s Future Movement, controlled Lebanon’s import and export markets. The latter’s interests won the day, paving the way both for years of relative Lebanese prosperity and then for its full-scale economic collapse years later.

After the civil war, Solidere decided to pave over the “Normandy” landfill in central Beirut with sand and bits of war rubble and allotted the 1.7 million square meter lot for construction. Some questioned the propriety of this development, arguing the Lebanese coast should be restored to its pre-war pristine beauty. Regardless, the plan went forward. Now, 20 years later, the area is almost completely undeveloped. Despite Solidere’s claims to have properly disposed of the waste beneath, recent studies have shown the land is still toxic. The foundation of Beirut’s post-war planning was literally rotten. As ordinary Lebanese face breakdowns in gas supplies, the electricity grid, garbage collection, and even critical water shortages, the corruption and failure behind Beirut Souks and central Beirut’s rebuilding have become striking microcosms of political dysfunction.

Towards the end of 2018 and into 2019, signs were emerging that Lebanon was bound for economic disaster. The banking sector had lent three-quarters of its deposits to the government and was becoming illiquid. The Lebanese pound’s fixed USD exchange rate of 1500:1 was impossible to sustain. Those who needed access to relatively large amounts of dollars were the first to notice. In Garo’s case, it was friends in jewelry who alerted him that things were about to go south. When they tried to withdraw 50 to 100,000 U.S. dollars in cash, the banks only fulfilled half their request and gave the rest as a check. The lack of liquidity these jewelers experienced when attempting to withdraw relatively large sums of money would soon be felt by everyone who tried to withdraw from a Lebanese bank, no matter the sum. Since the banking system collapsed in 2019, Lebanon’s real GDP has dropped by a jaw-dropping 45%, making it the second-worst financial collapse in history.

The defunct banking system means that credit cards and ATMs are not an option. The black market is where people get lira at the real price. A medium of exchange with mutually agreed upon value no longer holds true in Lebanon. It depends on who is negotiating for what, and you’re bound to get a bad deal if they know you’re a foreigner. If you go to an exchange as a foreigner, you do it through a local proxy.

After surveying the ruins of the Souks, we ran into another straggler doing the same. We’ll call him Amir, a Palestinian-Lebanese diplomat now working in China. In Garo’s case, he felt he had no choice but to return, leaving a comfortable life in Western Europe to be with his family in Lebanon. Amir, on the other hand, was just visiting Lebanon for a few weeks, having abandoned the country long ago. Both Garo and Amir have managed to develop careers that aren’t dependent on Lebanon’s decrepit economy. As such, they represent an important subset of the Lebanese population: those who can leave. Lebanon relies on its sizable diaspora population for remittances to family and friends still in the country. It’s not an uncommon strategy for states struggling to establish themselves as middle-class. But in Lebanon’s case, the diaspora acts more like a life jacket. Every day that U.S. dollars, British pounds, and euros continue to trickle in, the economy runs for a little bit longer.

As the three of us walked through the area, we discussed what remained in store for Lebanon. Garo insisted the country would be back. He justified his optimism by noting that Lebanon is an irreplaceable neutral link between Europe and the Middle East. It won’t be Israel or Syria that takes its place. Amir took a pessimistic view: “What’s been broken cannot be easily repaired,” he explained to me, “Lebanon needs generations of fixing and repairing. This is really hard for me to admit, not only to others but also to myself, that I’ve lost hope and faith in this country. I can’t help but feel pity for the ones who still believe things will change.” It wasn’t always this way for Amir. He’d earned his cynicism honestly, through years of watching the country reel between crises. “The thing is, I’ve always been the optimistic one…It took me decades to finally realize that Lebanon is consumed by corruption and greed.”

Primarily blaming Lebanon’s corrupt elite and their foreign masters is the most common explanation for the country’s failure. But ultimately, a corrupt state tends to inculcate its vices in the population itself. Garo bluntly articulated how deeply this greed and corruption has affected the Lebanese people themselves and chastised them for their cowardice, “The government has always been corrupt, but the people didn’t care because their pockets were being lined too. They pay no taxes. They only care now because their lifestyle is being affected…This is the fight for a nation, and what did everyone do at the first sign of trouble? They packed up and left.”

As more of Lebanon’s educated elite flee, the services sector is also evaporating. Lebanon’s economic foundation is undergoing a painful, but necessary transformation. If inflation fuels demand for Lebanese industry, then perhaps the country can reign in its massive trade deficit. Without domestic production, Lebanese merchants are stuck with the problem of importing goods at world market rates and trying to sell them in the Lebanese economy. Many have determined that hoarding is preferable to accepting a massive discount on their sale. In late August, the military raided two warehouses in the Sidon district and found massive stockpiles of illegally hoarded medicine.

I sat down with Dr. Ghassan Doghman, a general surgery specialist who has been struggling with the shortage and hoarding of medicine firsthand, “Sometimes we ask to purchase medicine, and they say it isn’t available. But then you are able to find it on the black market, which means it’s there.” Without access to Ezmeron, a commonly-used local anesthetic, Dr. Doghman has been using an older generation drug named Nimbex. “But sooner or later, Nimbex will go out of stock, so we will have to resort to a bottle of vodka or whisky to alleviate the patient’s pain.” One day, while Dr. Doghman had four surgeries underway, the power went out. A nurse had to hold a phone light over the patients while the surgeons stitched them back up.

​​While shortages will cause some to endure excruciating pain from these second- and third-rate anesthetic remedies, some drugs don’t have substitutes. Later that week, a rally was held outside Lebanon’s United Nations building, pleading for international support in acquiring life-saving cancer medications. I spoke to one forlorn cancer patient who had already missed two treatments. Asked if her third was scheduled, the answer was a nervous and definitive no. She told me that her next treatment wasn’t scheduled either, and that no donors had sponsored her case. All the people that day were specifically requesting help from the outside world, not from the government, which most donors don’t trust to distribute funds for their intended purpose. But the chances are low for any particular individual to get help. Most NGOs are already at capacity. Even the best-intentioned ones are now trying to fill a very large vacuum in what little remains of Lebanon’s civil society.

“The Skyline Is Beautiful on Fire”

Lebanon isn’t embroiled in an active civil war in 2021. But according to some residents who lived through it, conditions now are worse than during the war itself. For Dr. Doghman and his colleagues, they can’t offer nearly the same quality of care: “I was at the American University of Beirut Medical Center for the entire war, from 1977 to 1989. We were never in shortage of electricity, medicines, or medical supplies. We had casualties coming in from all over Lebanon, and we were able to function regularly.” He took me upstairs to the maternity ward, “Usually when you deliver a baby, you are happy to bring a life into this world. These days when you give birth, you look at the baby and say ‘what are you doing coming to Lebanon? Why the hell do you need to come to Lebanon?’”

As collapse unfolds around them, many Lebanese people are doing what they always have: escaping into one void or another. Escapism became a signature feature of the Lebanese spirit during the civil war. Instead of waiting for an end, Lebanese people learned to adapt to the violence and live alongside it. With a considerable degree of luck, street smarts, and the satiation of wealth, it was possible to alleviate the misery. There was a profitable import mix of diamonds, smoked salmon, caviar, small arms, and explosives. Lebanese people resorted to indulging in the country’s great affluence as a coping mechanism. Thomas Friedman, at the time a Beirut correspondent for The New York Times, captured the city’s “distinctive and bizarre flavor” with this illustration:

On this particular Christmas Eve in 1983, despite the holiday, rival Christian and Muslim militiamen were trading artillery salvos and machine-gun fire into the early evening, rocking the whole neighborhood. The hostess put off serving dinner, hoping things would settle down, but she could see that her friends were getting hungry, not to mention nervous. Finally, in an overture you won’t find in Emily Post’s book of etiquette, she turned to her guests and asked, “Would you like to eat now or wait for the cease-fire?”

Instead of a fancy meal during an ongoing artillery barrage, the Lebanese nightmare dinner in 2021 is rationing expired food between your family in the dark with no air conditioning. Because of the electricity crisis, food poisoning is rampant as people have no choice but to eat perishable items that have long thawed in their dormant refrigerators. It’s Russian roulette whether that chicken you bought will make you horribly sick for weeks, but many can’t afford to buy fresh. Does all this mean that life is really worse than during the war? It sounds hyperbolic, but Lebanon’s economic collapse is all-encompassing, and the reality of life in the country at present is one of egalitarian misery. Even the political class has discovered that there’s an upper limit to what they can solve with patronage. There was certainly no escape from the port explosion—no one could call in a favor to teleport them to a bomb shelter.

Many of Lebanon’s politicians and oligarchs have no choice but to stay in the country, which is indispensable to their rent-seeking operations and personal networks. It’s where their security is guaranteed and where their assets are tied up. But going to restaurants or being seen in their favorite public spots anymore has become a risky endeavor. Even prominent figures must now fear harassment, or worse.

As I sat on a crowded beach in the coastal oasis of Batroun with Lebanese-Canadian photographer Celine Barakat, a helicopter made a low pass in front of us. “Military?” I asked. “No, it’s a politician, probably the foreign minister, Gebran Bassil.” Celine explained. She then told me that Bassil and many of his colleagues can’t even drive on the roads anymore because people will set up roadblocks. Bassil has an especially large target on his head as one of the most high-ranking public officials. The anti-Hezbollah activist Gino Raidy has even published a list of businesses in Batroun associated with Bassil, pleading that people boycott them. It’s a futile undertaking. Bassil and his friends still own and operate Batroun, after all—a rare haven with no blast damage, active weddings, tourism, and busy shops. It’s a different world from the rest of the country.

But the tradition of escapism lives on in Beirut as well. The nightlife districts of Gemmayze and Mar Mikhael are among the most revived from the port explosion. The profitability and popularity of this sector made it a priority for reconstruction, and NGOs were quick to offer support. On a Saturday, venues are packed to the brim, and some of them are pretty nice. Other buildings in the same neighborhood still lay in complete ruins, their owners waiting for insurance payouts that are unlikely to ever come. Emblematic of the Lebanese economy is a gas station that sits across the road on the edge of a bar strip in Gemmayze. The place is long abandoned and its roof has collapsed. People switching venues cross the road away from it, pretending not to notice. What’s much harder is ignoring the sound of the Israeli jets that often circle Beirut while the parties go on.

On the edge of Gemmayze, near Martyrs’ Square, is the newly opened Aout Gallery founded by the young art researcher and gallerist Zeid El-Amine. Zeid opened the gallery in honor of his late father, who was killed in the port explosion in this same building. The exhibition at the time of opening was called Moon Garden, featuring works by Korean artist Minyoung Kim. The collection was made up of mystical drawings in which the moon, at different stages of the lunar cycle, is omnipresent. They evoke a sense of benign dreaming, and that’s the point. Moon Garden is Aout’s second exhibition after its inaugural Young Dreams, the intent of which Zeid explained to Arab News: “I think with everything happening around us right now, we just need a moment to fantasize and dream.” Zeid felt it was crucial to bring some vitality into the city, and the galley is doing well despite the odds. But few others have the spirit to rebuild. I asked Zeid’s friend Makram, who participated in the recent protests and has now emigrated to Cyprus, what he thought about the rebuilding drive: “We got tear-gassed and beat up for a year, and for what? Nothing has changed,” he replied, “And it won’t.”

Instead of Zeid’s pristine gallery, it’s the chaotic continuum of art and vandalism on Beirut’s city walls that present a more accurate depiction of the current Lebanese psyche. They tell the story of a country moving from motivated revolution to realizing the impotence of this revolt, the fury and mania that followed this realization, and finally a fall into nihilism and despair. The tags which are most revealing are those in which the art avoids subversion by a political message. Near Martyrs’ Square, I found an illustration that best depicts the archetype of a Lebanese political activist. Perhaps a self-portrait, the subject is clearly tormented and screaming into the void. Those who weren’t already deeply cynical about Lebanon are learning not to submit themselves to that sort of neuroticism. They would rather be sitting at a bar next to a beach in Batroun. Or better yet, they’ve left the country. One tag perfectly captured that final stage of nihilism: “The skyline is beautiful on fire.”

Now that Lebanon is no longer an engine for prosperity, its short-term trajectory is grave. As a region, Lebanon may yet be back in the long run, but no amount of historic geopolitical advantages make up for the fact that the country lacks anything like a functional regime. Until that situation changes, its other calamities can only continue. And at this point, it seems certain that change won’t come from within. Corruption in Lebanon compromises every level of stratification, not just the elite: the citizen avoids taxes, the political parties smuggle fuel, and the power-brokers have their private interests to take care of. Those still here increasingly believe that the country in its current form is beyond saving. But there’s a utility to their apathy. Most people abandoned Lebanon long before it reached this point of deterioration; they never felt it was their responsibility to bail out a sinking ship. Indeed, the average citizen has had little power to influence the corrupt nature of the state. Better to carve out your own little piece of it and keep life going as best you can.

To the degree that Lebanon’s foreign stakeholders do want to invest in the country’s revival, no patron-state will allow their opposing counterpart to fix anything in a meaningful way. Rivals perceive those attempts as power grabs, and they’re probably right. With the exception of Iran and Hezbollah, all other international stakeholders in Lebanon see the country as a sunk cost. France is doing the bare minimum to remain a regional player, the U.S. has concerns elsewhere, and the Gulf states are getting out while they can.

The next chapter in Lebanese history is unpredictable because when there are so many looming catastrophes, you can’t predict which will materialize first. One thing you do know: the center cannot hold, so get out while you can.

Another Lebanese officer pointed my attention to some crops across the waterway. “Some Lebanese people have property in Syria, as do some Syrians in Lebanon. So we must let them cross.” Further up the road was the first hard border we saw, but this isn’t an entry point for Syria; it’s a checkpoint outside a Lebanese enclave within Syrian territory. Beyond that checkpoint, I’m told, there is no consistent Lebanese military presence anymore. Both the Lebanese and Syrian pound are valid tenders.

But the military isn’t interested in the farmers here. Instead, they are apprehending suspected petroleum smugglers on a daily basis, they told me. This smuggling, which has cost Lebanon an estimated $20 billion over the last five years, is a key reason why Lebanon has the highest fuel prices in the world. Until recently, smugglers were purchasing fuel at a Lebanese central bank-subsidized rate and selling it for profit to both the Syrian government and to rebel groups. Realizing these subsidies were a perverse incentive, and to help preserve Lebanon’s diminishing foreign currency reserves, the central bank rescinded the subsidies back in July causing fuel prices to skyrocket. This has exacerbated the plight of Lebanese consumers in the short term, who are suffering from what the World Bank describes as one of the worst financial collapses in the last 150 years.

The ambiguous and lawless border is only one of the most extreme examples of the ongoing crisis of the Lebanese state as a whole. Always a fragile construction, its dysfunction has allowed religious authority and the patronage of foreign powers to fill the vacuum. And no one has played this game better than the Shiite Islamist political party and U.S-designated terrorist organization known as Hezbollah. Hezbollah, whose name means “Party of God,” operates within the state while brazenly flaunting its effective independence from it.

But removing the subsidies hasn’t curbed smuggling, which is fundamentally a consequence of several rounds of harsh sanctions placed on Syria by the U.S., preventing Lebanese merchants from legally conducting business with the Assad regime and connected entities. The Lebanese military can’t possibly prevent all smuggling along its 245-mile border with Syria given its current capacity. While all major Lebanese political parties participate in fuel smuggling, the lynchpin of this racket is the network of alternative border crossings run by Hezbollah.

Soon after I left Lebanon, fierce street battles erupted in Beirut on October 14th, with Hezbollah and the Amal movement, another Shia political party, on one side and who they accuse to be Lebanese Forces, a Christian party with close ties to Saudi Arabia, on the other. Seven people, three of whom were from the Shia militias, were killed, with dozens more injured. It was the worst violence Beirut has seen since 2008, when Hezbollah clashed with the Future Movement, a Sunni political party, and with the Progressive Socialist Party, which predominantly represents the Druze minority. October’s fighting wasn’t sparked by record-high inflation or by critical shortages of gasoline and medicine, but rather because Hezbollah organized a protest outside the Lebanese justice ministry to demand that a judge who was investigating the causes of the infamous Beirut port explosion be removed and himself investigated for bias. The shooting “began from the Christian neighborhood of Ain el-Remmaneh, before spiraling into an exchange of gunfire,” a military source told Reuters. The military quickly secured the area, but by that time fighting had already spread to surrounding neighborhoods. 

The military is one of the only institutions of Lebanon’s central government that isn’t completely dysfunctional. It has carved out a position of high legitimacy among the population and Lebanon’s major allies because its ranks boast members from all the major religious sects. But the government has been increasingly relying on the military to carry out missions for which it is neither trained nor funded, like basic police work.

The present economic collapse has also put enormous strain on the military, with the average soldier only making the equivalent of $84 per month as of mid-July. Without the authoritative presence and broad mandate of the military, the Western powers and Lebanon’s other religious sects all fear Hezbollah could move into the power vacuum and take control of the country. The irony is that if the much weaker Lebanese military ever tried to extricate Hezbollah, it would likely be defeated. The Shiite group would then tighten its grip on the country even further. But a full-scale conflict is unlikely; the most important lesson from Lebanon’s 15-year civil war is that no single sect can totally dominate while the country’s fractious current paradigm remains.

Driving between the Lebanese military checkpoints in the Hezbollah-dominated Beqaa Valley, we passed billboards and large busts of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, and the recently-assassinated Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani. After making contact with a Lebanese military regiment near the border, I jumped into a U.S.-supplied Humvee to join them on their patrol. The convoy of six Humvees, a handful of jeeps, and a few dozen soldiers were heavily armed for good reason. “We sometimes encounter ambushes here,” an officer told me as we drove through the ambiguous territory. But the fact that only about half the soldiers wore their ballistic vests and helmets told me that this was an unlikely occurrence in broad daylight.

A few minutes later, I noticed fields of marijuana crops next to us. Why are these allowed to exist? “It’s not our job, the national security service is supposed to take care of it.” And why don’t they? I didn’t get a clear answer. A local contact later alleged that the security services are paid off to ignore them. The drug lords, mostly Hezbollah members, openly flaunt their merchandise and weaponry on TV with the blessing of the ruling Christian Maronite party, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). As we drove on, I leaned back into the cabin area of the humvee and snapped a picture of a large flattering banner featuring Nasrallah. “Do you know who that is?” the soldier asked. “A rockstar,” I jokingly replied. “Wrong, he’s a pornstar. He fucks the Lebanese people!”

As a bulwark against Hezbollah, the U.S. has invested more than $2.6 billion in the Lebanese military since 2006. This funding has enabled it “to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Lebanon, carry out operations against al-Qaeda, and expand control over Lebanese territory along its border with Syria,” according to the U.S. State Department. The regiment with which I was embedded was equipped with U.S.-made military gear, such as the quintessential Iraq War-era Humvees complete with .50 M2 Browning turret guns, as well as Vietnam War-era M151 Jeeps, select-fire M4 rifles, and more. Several Western countries and Saudi Arabia supply a lot of their other equipment, and some old acquisitions from the Soviet Union make up the remainder. A Lebanese military officer was eager to show me a British-made state-of-the-art observation tower: “With this technology, we can see someone coming into Lebanon from miles away.”

But what good is this equipment when rampant smuggling still persists? I asked an officer what happens to the suspects they apprehend. After a few seconds of contemplating the question, he reluctantly admitted that he didn’t know. Not only does the Lebanese military lack the capacity to deter smuggling, but they also lack the authority as part of a government complicit in the practice.

On August 19th, I was sitting in a hotel lounge in Beirut listening to Nasrallah announce the group’s plan to import oil from Iran. In the middle of his speech, the power went out. It took about five minutes for everything to reboot and Nasrallah’s face once again graced the television screen. These power outages are now so frequent in Beirut that most people don’t even flinch or complain anymore. Instead, they sigh and wait to hear the click of a power line switching from their local grid to a generator. But not everyone can afford a generator, those who have one can’t always afford the fuel, and those who can afford the fuel can’t always find it. Lebanon hasn’t had a reliable state electricity grid since before its civil war, but reasonably priced and readily available fuel for generators made this an inefficiency instead of a crisis. Power outages from the central grid have lasted up to 23 hours a day since the start of August. On October 9th, the grid collapsed entirely, leaving the country in the dark for several days. Combined with the rise in fuel prices, living conditions in Lebanon are getting worse.

Later that night, I was minding my own business in Beirut with some new friends when the thundering sound of Israeli F-35s interrupted our conversation. Israel had launched airstrikes on a Hezbollah warehouse along the Syrian-Lebanese border and the planes were now circling Beirut. The strike was likely authorized by Paris and Washington, both of which have warned several times against Hezbollah circumventing the state to provide a solution to the fuel crisis themselves. My friends were unfazed. The Israeli air force frequently violates Lebanese airspace with impunity. We moved on to another venue in the Hamra district, the crown jewel of Beirut that was still noticeably scarred from the 2020 port explosion. Near the end of the night, the dance floor went limp after yet another power cut. Again, few people complained; eye-rolling and some nihilistic shrugs were the main responses. Many Beirutis described this whole experience to me as a humiliation.

Shortly after Nasrallah’s announcement, the first oil tanker set sail from Iran to arrive in Lebanon by mid-September. The procurement of foreign oil represents a massive victory for Hezbollah against the Lebanese state and a propaganda win among the Lebanese people. Nasrallah spoke as the effective Lebanese head of state that day, warning Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the West against interfering with the shipments: “I tell the Americans and the Israelis that as soon as the ship sails, it becomes Lebanese territory.” Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Saudi-Lebanese politician whose father was a previous prime minister himself, was outraged that Nasrallah, a non-state leader, was speaking on Lebanon’s behalf. Hezbollah is developing the institutional logic of a regime—military strength, administrative capability, and an independent foreign policy—without formalizing its rule over the state. The organization has crafted itself a hybrid status: state-like power without formal state responsibilities or sovereignty.

Hezbollah’s Heuristics of Statecraft

Lebanon’s drift towards becoming a failed state only benefits Hezbollah, which will, in turn, be legitimized by more Lebanese people who have no other choice but to seek their support for gasoline, medical services, and other staples that aren’t provided by the absent central government. A 36-year-old father of two who had no choice but to accept support from Hezbollah described the dynamic well to Bloomberg: “They starve you so you have to run to them for food.”

Founded in 1982 as a consolidated militia to resist the Israeli invasion, Hezbollah is the only group that didn’t disarm after Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. Hezbollah was forged by the patronage of the newly-empowered Iranian mullahs who helped mobilize support from the disempowered Shiite population, largely concentrated in Lebanon’s south. The group’s continued existence is justified by the Lebanese state, which sees it as a bulwark for a national military that is wholly unprepared for war against the ultra-modern Israeli military.

Hezbollah is widely believed to be responsible for the 2005 assassination of Sunni Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was highly influential in crafting the 1989 Taif Accord that ended the civil war. Following his death, Hezbollah, the Maronite Christian FPM, and a number of smaller groups formed the March 8 Coalition. In 2016, the civil war-era general Michel Aoun of the FPM was elected president of Lebanon, and two years later the coalition won a parliamentary majority after just under half of Lebanese citizens cast their ballots. With tight support from Iran and a flexible status which permits them to create quasi-governmental institutions within Lebanon, Hezbollah wields significant political power within the government of Michel Aoun and the FPM.

The concept of Westphalian sovereignty, in which a state has sovereignty over its internal affairs to the exclusion of foreign powers, does little to describe how power actually operates in Lebanon and its region. Hezbollah has successfully institutionalized itself as a de-facto ruling power in Lebanon’s non-homogeneous regime. The most powerful and established states in the region—especially Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey—also rely on a mix of religious authorities, ethnic diasporas, and non-state militant organizations to project power and maintain legitimacy.

The formal state is merely one part of these regimes: the institutional branch that launders political legitimacy for the other groups to the world order. Iran’s mullahs might run their Guardian Council, but Iran also has a parliament, judiciary, and domestic police force. These state institutions are ultimately controlled by the religious authorities but have a degree of autonomy from them. Lebanon is exceptional in this sense because many of the subcomponents of its political order are puppets of the region’s most powerful states. Lebanon’s political economy is thus a microcosm of broader regional ethnic and religious tensions, particularly the sprawling proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. But life under the same national roof forces these enemies to co-exist. Real civic nationalism and unity have never taken root in Lebanon because the country is little more than a conglomeration of uncooperative, even incompatible, groups.

In order to rule Lebanon, the balance of loyalty has to tip in your favor across the country’s 18 sects, which is why Hezbollah’s alliance with FPM is so crucial. The Christian Armenian minority is also part of this coalition and has six seats in parliament. To learn more about how this complex alliance plays out in practice, I sat down with Vera Yakoubian, head of the Armenian National Committee in the Middle East and member of the Lebanese-Armenian political party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.

“What do the Armenians think about being allied with Hezbollah?” I asked. “We don’t have an alliance with Hezbollah, we are not allies. We are allies with the Free Patriotic Movement under General Michel Aoun, who is an ally of Hezbollah. But as Lebanese, we don’t consider Hezbollah to be a radical political organization. We consider it as resistance against Israel,” Yakoubian said.

I asked what she made of Hezbollah’s subjugation of the Lebanese government. She paused and then stuttered before reluctantly admitting the truth: “Lebanon is actually controlled by Hezbollah. But in the future, nobody in Lebanon can totally control the other parts. If they try, there will be another civil war.”

Knowing that they can’t claim a mandate to monopolize power, Hezbollah is willing to leave many state functions fulfilled by Lebanon’s formal government and military, even as it actively usurps others. But, unable to conduct its own foreign policy, police borders, uphold internal order, or even militarily outmatch Hezbollah’s forces, the Lebanese state’s role as a legitimacy-laundering operation remains the only real basis for its continued existence.

Finally, 13 months after the resignation of Prime Minister Hassan Diab due to widespread outrage over the port explosion, and endless squabbling between the sects over who would fill the ministerial positions, Najib Miqati managed to form a new government on October 10th and became the new prime minister. But corruption is an inherent aspect, even a tradition, in Lebanon’s political system since the more power vested in a ministry, the more valuable it is for a political party and its cronies. Once they attain any political power, whether it be the administration of permits or the control of government coffers, the winners promptly appropriate the position for their factional benefit. Transparency International ranks Lebanon 149 out of 180 countries in its Corruption Perception Index.

Yakoubian’s unwillingness to label Hezbollah an ally demonstrates that the current ruling coalition is a purely strategic partnership. The political coalition in opposition to the government—which includes the Future Movement, the Christian party Lebanese Forces, and a number of smaller parties—consider Hezbollah to be an outright terrorist organization. But for the time being and foreseeable future, Hezbollah is the most powerful force in Lebanon.

The confessional power-sharing formula which keeps the country from degenerating into civil war is what simultaneously incentivizes this corruption. The government cannot act with a common purpose because the different sects fundamentally distrust each other. Even when compromises are made, these decisions will always be viewed in sectarian terms by the Lebanese population, which is justifiably cynical. No one has enough power to take full control of the state and the military and govern Lebanon on their own. The consequence is a country in free-fall.

Compounding this reality, Hezbollah’s allegiance lies with the Iranian regime, not necessarily with its Lebanese constituents and certainly not with its allies in the Lebanese government. These ties to Tehran make it impossible for the group to be the outward face of the country. But Hezbollah’s ability to unilaterally provide solutions while the government flounders has created a crucial moment of legitimization for the group, transforming it from a semi-integrated member of the state to an organization exercising sovereign-style action in its own right.

As the tankers of Iranian fuel rolled out of the docks and through villages, several videos emerged of Hezbollah members spraying celebratory gunfire into the air. In one video, a man shot off a rocket-propelled grenade which then landed on a neighboring house. What comes up must come down. The Taliban recently banned this practice in Afghanistan, perhaps a sign they are taking the role of official government seriously. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has no interest in ruling Lebanon officially.

Lebanon’s fuel shortage is completely artificial, a consequence of black market demand from Syria. Ironically, the country imported more gas in the previous year than at any other time in the nation’s history. While Hezbollah is ostensibly solving a problem the central government couldn’t, it is also directly responsible for the current state of affairs as one of the chief culprits of fuel smuggling in Lebanon. In an attempt to halt the Iranian fuel and prevent a Hezbollah victory, four U.S. senators traveled to Lebanon on September 1st and met with the Lebanese leadership. The senators warned the government of the “severely damaging consequences” of accepting Iran’s fuel, but evidently, the message was unconvincing.

Washington’s policy response was quite significant: making an exception to its sanctions regime by allowing Egyptian fuel to flow into Lebanon via Jordan and Syria, perhaps showing a softening of the U.S.’s hardline stance toward the Assad regime in Syria. The Caesar Civilian Protection Act of 2019 targets entities providing funding or assistance to the Assad regime. These sanctions are devastating for Lebanon as it has the potential to be a central player in the lucrative reconstruction of Syria. In televised remarks on June 16th earlier this year, Nasrallah condemned the sanctions, saying the policy “aims to starve Lebanon in the same way it aims to starve Syria.” Thus Hezbollah was able to secure a double-victory by leaving the U.S. with no choice but to either withhold Caesar Act sanctions or weaken its grip on Lebanon even further.

When the Egyptian fuel arrives, it will need to come through southern Syria from Jordan before crossing into Lebanon. While Syria’s civil war still rages in its northwestern Idlib province and in its northeastern Kurdish region, its southern and western borders with Jordan and Lebanon are almost completely under government control, making the resumption of commerce with those countries possible. But the Egyptian fuel isn’t supposed to reach Lebanon until the end of 2021, as the Arab Gas Pipeline still needs substantial repairs. This means Hezbollah will remain the largest supplier of fuel in the country for at least the next three months, allowing it to gather fresh political support among consumers who have not previously supported the group.

Hezbollah has thrived during the Syrian civil war as an important ally to Assad and the Syrian government. But the war also created the conditions for Lebanon to be desperate enough to allow Hezbollah to accept Iranian fuel because of the increased sanctions faced by many of its suppliers. Now that the Syrian civil war is coming to a close, Lebanon is finally getting back on good terms with its neighborhood.

Lebanon’s Refugee Crisis

Entering the village of Qaa, the last population center solidly in Lebanese territory before the ambiguous border area, we drove through an arch marked by the flags of the twin Shia militias Hezbollah and Amal—yellow and green, respectively. Fixed to every streetlight were a large Amal flag and a solar panel on top. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has been funding solar energy projects in Lebanon since 2006, including a solar farm for farmers in this town. This panel was probably a part of that project. Sustainable energy solutions might work in isolated scenarios, and the farmers are certainly grateful, but the UN’s solution isn’t scalable when Lebanese people are making the equivalent of less than $100 a month. Desperate people aren’t concerned about their carbon footprint.

A few hundred meters down the road, still underneath these glimmering solar-powered light posts, is a stark juxtaposition: hundreds of cars waiting in line at the local gas station. These massive queues are normal across the country, and when the station runs out of fuel, some people opt to keep their cars parked in line overnight so they don’t lose their spot. “Gas station line essentials,” reads an Instagram caption written by a Lebanese girl named Miriam alongside a photo of her friends playing a board game in the backseat of their stationary vehicle. While the Western NGOs fund niche sustainable energy projects, Hezbollah has secured what the Lebanese people really needed: gasoline. In the words of a local Tinder bio: “If you have benzene, you have my heart.” The Iranians might have their own savior complex, but they seem to be more realistic about giving their clients what they need.

The NGOs, mostly Western in origin and funding, are another essential subcomponent in Lebanon’s non-homogeneous regime. There are dozens of NGOs operating in Lebanon that are either assisting or assuming responsibility for the basic functions of civil society. Western governments have crippled Lebanon with sanctions, and then sent in friendly NGOs to pick up the slack. Like Hezbollah, many of these NGOs are in Lebanon to serve the interests of their foreign backers instead of the Lebanese state.

Nowhere do NGOs play a more important role than in the task of supporting Lebanon’s massive Syrian refugee population. The Brookings Institution estimates there are nearly 866,000 registered Syrian refugees still living in Lebanon, but closer to 1.5 million Syrians in the country overall. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) places Lebanon second only to Aruba for the world’s highest ratio of refugees to the native population. Over 20% of the population is now made up of Syrians, most of whom are Sunni, putting stress on Lebanon’s delicately balanced confessional system.  The ruling coalition of Hezbollah and FPM considers the Syrian conflict to be effectively finished and is trying to move refugees home. But the Sunni opposition, religiously aligned with the refugees, questions the legitimacy of the Assad regime and prevents negotiations between the two countries.

In 2016, Lebanese leaders criticized then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon when he appeared to suggest that Lebanon should naturalize its refugees. Such a move would permanently alter Lebanon’s confessional balance in favor of the Sunni opposition by boosting their political weight. And of course, the Sunnis have an interest in artificially growing their sect in Lebanon by naturalizing the Syrian refugees. In 2018, the EU and UN released a joint statement on the status of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, stressing the need to “ensure that any evacuation of civilians must be safe, informed, temporary, voluntary in nature and a solution of last resort including the destination of their choice, the right to return and the choice to stay, as per [international humanitarian law].” The FPM declared this statement to be an attack on Lebanese sovereignty. Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, known for his hostile and bombastic comments against Syrian refugees, said that “no one can give [Lebanon] lessons” on dealing with the refugee crisis “because all of them have not carried the burden the way we have.”

Unfortunately for the refugees who planned on staying indefinitely, donor fatigue has also set in among the supporters of NGOs, and the countries hosting the refugees are growing increasingly impatient. In tacit recognition of Assad’s legitimacy, current UNHCR Filippo Grandi recently tweeted that he has “discussed with the Syrian Government ways to strengthen coordination as we address internal displacement and to cooperate in removing obstacles to the return of refugees.” Many signs point towards at least a partial Assad victory in Syria’s civil war, with potential partitions ceded to the Kurds and Turkey. Syria’s Western-backed enemies, including Lebanese Sunni groups, are slowly recognizing that Assad and his government remain in control of Syria. Political obstruction on the part of Lebanese Sunnis to repatriating Syrian Sunni refugees makes sense as an attempt to maintain power in a country where the momentum is in Hezbollah’s favor.

After my visit to the border, we headed south for the Bar-Elias Syrian refugee camp, 25 miles inside Lebanon near the border crossing to Damascus. I went through a complex accreditation process to get access to the camp, but once there I ended up just walking right inside, just as the refugees can walk right out. Despite not officially having residency freedoms or privileges, most Syrian refugees are under little supervision in the camp. There was no military checkpoint to check my papers, no razor wire perimeter, nor any government infrastructure to stop the refugees from freely traveling around Lebanon. Instead, the refugees face persecution from the private sector.

We approached a man who seemed to be a community leader. He had a large family and dressed more finely than the other residents of the camp. During our discussion via a translator, he confirmed that he can leave the Bar-Elias camp at will and no one asks him any questions. The only thing he isn’t allowed to do is buy gas from the local gas station because the owner won’t sell it to him. A refugee from Aleppo, he has lived in Lebanon since 2011. I remarked to him that Aleppo is safe now, and asked if he intends to return. He responded that even if the city is militarily safe, the situation on the ground won’t be any better than inside the refugee camp. According to a survey by UNHCR, 70% of Syrian refugees say they intend to return someday, but many also say they don’t wish to return to Syria for at least a year—and of that group, 69% want to stay in their host country for now.

When the man first arrived in Lebanon, there were seven in his family, and he’s since had four more children. “How do you make a living here?” I asked. His family gets money from an NGO: 100,000 lira per person, per month. Official bank rates translate this into about $65 per head. But those rates don’t matter here; at the black market rate for USD, he’s getting around $5 per head. This amount is unsustainable for a large family. Given his attire, he must have had other forms of income. Even a 10-year-old girl I spoke to was working on a local farm, making about $1 a day, while another boy of about 14 did the same at a local mechanic shop.

“How did you end up in Lebanon? Why not Turkey?” I asked the man. He suggested the deciding factor was the work opportunities in Lebanon and that it was difficult to get into Turkey, or Europe for that matter. Back in the car, I debriefed with my translator. Why would the local gas station not sell to him? He responded that if the man does not have a car then perhaps the store owner is worried that he is involved with smuggling fuel. So then why would he need money from the NGOs? My translator was blunt about his view of the situation: “The refugees go to an NGO, collect their free cheque, then visit three more and do the same thing. The refugees are bad for Lebanon; they all need to leave.”

Not all the camps are as easily accessible as Bar-Elias. In Lebanon’s southern Sidon district sits the notorious Ain al-Hilweh camp, which hosts an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and an additional 40,000 Syrians. Since this camp is controlled by Hezbollah instead of the government, I was denied access. Lebanese media frequently labels the camp a zone of lawlessness by Lebanese media and is said to have hosted terror cells from al-Qaeda and Hamas—but mostly Hezbollah itself. After an attempted assassination attempt on his life in 2005, then-defense minister Elias Murr claimed the culprits were being given refuge there. The camp also helped stall the 1982 Israeli advance on Beirut in 1982 by eight days which inflicted heavy casualties on the invading troops. During the civil war, the camp was run by various Palestinian groups until Hezbollah took partial control in 1993, which they have maintained ever since.

The Lebanese government insists that it lacks the resources to apprehend suspects in Ain al-Hilweh. What they really lack is the authority from Tehran and Damascus. In 2017, the government finished constructing a concrete wall around the perimeter. This is the same desperate solution the Colombian government resorted to in 1991 for Pablo Escobar when it constructed him and his entourage a private prison, but really a fortress, from which he could manage his drug empire with impunity.

Ain al-Hilweh is a microcosm of the Lebanese state, where Hezbollah has thrived in the Hobbesian chaos. Sanctions have only emboldened the group and legitimized their claim that the Western axis wants to punish, not help Lebanon. Hezbollah and its patron-state Iran aren’t becoming complacent either. Their mission to cement Hezbollah as the undisputed de-facto authority in Lebanon continues. Fuel shipments were just the beginning. On October 8th, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Lebanon and pledged to build two power stations as well as rebuild the Beirut port, “if the Lebanese government makes such a request.” He went on to say that “I would like to assure you that the Islamic Republic of Iran will always stand alongside Lebanon and assist it in overcoming the various problems it is going through.”

Hezbollah endures and their coercion is legitimized: Iran recognizes they have a responsibility to maintain Lebanon if their proxy increasingly rules it. Iran has heavily invested in having a foothold on the northern Israeli border, and while some Lebanese see this presence as pushing Lebanon towards conflict with Israel, others think having a defense against Israel alone is justification for Hezbollah to have outsized political power. Wielding power over this tiny but important Mediterranean country has earned Hezbollah the status of Iran’s most successful proxy organization, but not the status of a real government.

While lacking a mandate to actually rule Lebanon, Hezbollah has successfully occupied the shell of an almost completely failed state. Sanctions have created a vicious feedback loop, in which attempts to curb Hezbollah’s influence just deteriorate the Lebanese state, which allows Hezbollah to fill the vacuum of state function. The Lebanese military is desperately trying to hold the center as the only legitimate state institution. But the military lacks the capacity to hold on to power, and Hezbollah has proved that a mandate is easier to build than capacity. Hezbollah also has a powerful ally in the victorious Assad government in Syria, both of which now have an interest in repatriating as many Syrian refugees as possible to undermine Sunni influence in Lebanon. Repatriation prevents the Sunnis from growing their base in Lebanon, and protects Hezbollah’s Shiite base from the internal threat of Sunni influence.

But while Hezbollah continues to consolidate power, the sanctions they attract and international support they repel are damaging as they try to garner more widespread legitimacy. Until now, popular support hasn’t been imperative to Hezbollah’s strategy. It has preferred to foster a weak Lebanese state and a weak population that will come begging on its doorstep for help. But as Hezbollah continues to usurp the Lebanese state, it increasingly won’t be able to avoid responsibility for state failures. At some point, a regime has to rule.

In November 2020, I began a three-week journey documenting the aftermath of Armenia’s conflict with Azerbaijan, and recently returned to the country to continue reporting on its precarious and uncertain future. The war was fought over the disputed mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh and several surrounding territories. It ended in Armenia’s near-total defeat, with a Russian-brokered peace deal finalized on November 9th. I spent four days visiting the region itself, in what is left of the independent Republic of Artsakh, an ethnic Armenian breakaway state which is claimed by Azerbaijan. But the peace deal is fragile, and many expect another war.

Armenians were shocked to find out just how incredibly unfavorable the November peace deal was. Armenia relinquished control of the seven provinces it had gained in the 1990s, as well as the strategically and culturally important city of Shushi, the region of Kelbajar which hosts the historic Armenian Dadivank Monastery, and other Armenian enclaves like Hadrut. What little territory Armenia was able to retain from the contested regions is being guarded—and, more accurately, controlled—by Russia. The Armenian military’s reliance on weapons and training from the Soviet era, combined with the neglect of the armed forces by successive governments, ensured their defeat.

My trip began with a rocky and inhospitable start. I was pulled aside at customs and had my passport confiscated because my visa hadn’t yet been approved. Several Armenian military and customs officials looked over me, then my passport, and then at each other, discussing what to do with this foreigner whom “no one invited to Armenia.” I was directed upstairs to an empty terminal where I spent the night, seemingly the only one in the entire place. After a frantic and sleepless night, my visa turned up approved around 9 AM. Having finally cleared customs, it was time to make my way towards Yerevan.

As I was leaving the airport, I was immediately solicited by the large numbers of cabbies milling about the area. Around $4 (or 2000 Dram) easily gets you across the entire city in full traffic. Armenia is an extremely poor country, with a GDP per capita of only around $4600 USD. For my part, I already had a ride. But explaining this was difficult—the Armenian language is one of the hardest on Earth to learn, with a completely independent alphabet and vocabulary.

As we approached downtown Yerevan, two police officers with AK-47’s were conducting seemingly indiscriminate searches of cars, a precaution due to assassination threats that had recently been made against Armenia’s prime minister. On the night when Pashinyan signed Armenia’s surrender, protestors stormed the national assembly and seriously assaulted the speaker of the parliament. For the next few days, a coup or assassination seemed imminent. But Pashinyan and his government have thus far survived despite the pressure. By the time I arrived, the war had been over for three weeks, with Russian boots on the ground and Pashinyan showing no signs of stepping down. Since the war, a deep sense of betrayal and abandonment has gripped Armenia: its government surrendered, Russia failed to intervene early enough, and the Western world ignored their struggle. However, the country had largely accepted that there was no way to reverse the peace deal. Although anti-government demonstrations were still taking place daily at Republic Square, their attendance and intensity were steadily decreasing.

Nevertheless, these demonstrations seemed like a good place to start reporting, and so I headed to Republic Square on my first full day in Armenia. A thick line of police was blocking the door to the Government House building as a senior officer called out Armenian names. The names were those of family members of soldiers who were missing in action or prisoners of war. As each name was called, the police line broke to allow the families into the building. The government was giving them a long-awaited update on the fate of their sons, husbands, and fathers. Among the crowd of family members were protestors, including several men who had fought in the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s. One man was highly decorated, displaying medals on his jacket and holding up a sign denouncing Pashinyan.

The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

The major factor in Azerbaijan’s victory was its edge in military technology, with recent purchases of advanced weapons systems from Turkey, Israel, and Canada. More than previous conflicts, this war was a significant demonstration of the potential of many new types of combat robotics, particularly a new generation of military drones. The two main drones Azerbaijan has under commission are the Israeli Harop and Turkish Bayraktar TB2.

The other major technological difference between this war and that of the 1990s was a ubiquitous internet, which both sides have used to their advantage. Videos depicting Azerbaijani soldiers beheading, torturing, and otherwise mistreating Armenian prisoners have been circulating in private messaging platforms like Telegram, with censored versions presented to larger audiences on curated platforms like Instagram. Azerbaijan has emerged as a brutal leader in the production of these viral war videos. A smaller number of videos depicting Armenian war crimes also circle around Azerbaijan, but they pale in comparison in both quantity and ruthlessness to the Azerbaijani videos. It’s a trend noted by foreign reporters as well as domestic, and a bad omen for the brutality with which future conflicts will be fought.

Every Armenian who was waiting outside the government building that day to get an update on their missing family member had undoubtedly seen these videos or been made aware of them. Before the war in the 1990s, Armenians and Azeris lived together in relative peace in several regions, including in Nagorno-Karabakh and in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Pre-internet, it was easier to move past the memory of war and for the victor to simply write history. Now, in contrast, the whole population is digitally participating at the front line, and directly witnessing the atrocities committed by the enemy, even from a diaspora neighborhood in Los Angeles or Toronto.

During the war, Armenians who were engaged on social media would be inundated with daily reports of deceased soldiers from diaspora outlets like Zartonk Media or The Armenian Report. The reports always included a long list of names followed by birth dates, typically ranging from around 1996 to 2002. Armenia’s military is young, and their training and preparation paled in comparison to the well-equipped military of Azerbaijan. Many Armenian men barely in their twenties found themselves in a leadership position after being conscripted to fight on the front line, responsible for leading 18-year-olds into battle. The result is that innumerable families have lost sons, brothers, and young husbands to the conflict. On January 28th, I visited Yerablur, Armenia’s main military graveyard, as crowds gathered to mourn the fallen on the country’s annual Army Day. A local friend led me through the graves and piles of flowers, pointing out the dates on the stones, as weeping families stood mourning around them.

While the mobilization of diaspora Armenians on social media has been successful insofar as it raises awareness about the conflict, Azerbaijan had the upper hand in the Western war of information and diplomacy. This was thanks to their use of growing oil wealth to develop geopolitical leverage and hard financial lobbying power in Western capitals, including Washington D.C. While the voices of diaspora Armenians were loud, they weren’t able to accomplish much more than garnering a few platitudes from Western politicians. Advocacy pales in comparison to lobbying and hard material incentives. Turkey has spent millions on sophisticated PR campaigns and developed a powerful propaganda machine, from soap operas to supportive front groups. Conversely, Armenia wasn’t organized or connected enough to gain the support of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, nor that of most Western governments.

Along with its fleet of cutting-edge drones, Azerbaijan also showcased their military and diplomatic might by using the expensive and controversial chemical weapon white phosphorus. Before traveling to Nagorno-Karabakh, I spent several days accompanying a team of doctors in Yerevan’s hospitals as they treated soldiers for the horrific injuries caused by this munition. A large number of foreign doctors have traveled to Armenia to assist in the treatment of injured soldiers, bringing with them crucial medical supplies and aid. Without them, many more of these men would have died in Armenia’s ill-equipped healthcare system, and become casualties of the conflict. I was introduced by a mutual friend to the two most experienced burn surgeons in Yerevan at that time and joined them for lunch one day before I accompanied them to the hospitals.

As we sat in a Lebanese restaurant eating kebab, Dr. Fouad Reda recounted his story to me. He runs a private practice as an aesthetic reconstructive plastic surgeon in Yerevan, where he’s lived for two years since arriving from Lebanon. His cosmetic procedures were put on hold when war broke out and he quickly shifted to treating wounded soldiers. Then, Armenian hospitals began receiving a massive influx of burn patients from the front line. Joining us was his colleague Dr. Raffi Barsoumian, an Armenian-American burn surgeon from New Jersey who’d recently arrived in Yerevan to volunteer his services. “You wouldn’t find burn surgeons in the United States who have experience with something like this unless they had assisted other physicians in theatres of war,” Dr. Barsoumian explained. Dr. Reda himself, it turned out, was the first to discover that white phosphorus was the cause of these burns. I asked Dr. Reda about his own story. He had prior experience treating white phosphorus victims in Lebanon in 2006 and Syria in 2017. The two told me about the horrific injuries the substance creates. As we ate lunch, they negotiated the exchange of scarce medical supplies which they had acquired through international donations.

The next day, we made our way into the hospital ward. The sight was grim—many of the injured soldiers had second- and third-degree burns covering their entire bodies. Most had been in the hospital system for weeks, their deep wounds still needing to be frequently re-dressed and tended to. One of the soldiers I spoke with was 18 years old and had volunteered to fight when the war broke out on September 27th. In addition to his burns, he was shot twice by a sniper in his backside. His survival was miraculous. After the medical team finished working on his face and hand, his father explained to me that he was a boxer, and still hoped to get back to the sport when his time here was done. Fortunately for him, the wounds on his hand looked set to heal. Not everyone was so lucky. His friend, who lay in the bed across from him, was in much worse shape. Third-degree burns almost completely covered his entire back.

When the gruesome re-dressings were done, the boxer’s father brought refreshments for the two soldiers. Despite their injuries, both men’s faces lit up. As I photographed the moment, I wondered what the pair—barely of age—had seen together on the front line. The boxer’s father told me their story as they ate. As the war raged on and Armenia was pushed back into the forests to hide from Azerbaijan’s drones, the Azerbaijanis had launched white phosphorus attacks to burn away the brush and the soldiers hiding within. They had been caught in the attack.

White phosphorus is an extremely combustible and poisonous chemical weapon that has a complicated standing in international law. Despite the horrific injuries and the invariably indiscriminate way the weapon is used on the battlefield, its use is generally not considered to be a war crime unless it is used against civilians.

But white phosphorus is still controversial enough for Azerbaijan to deny using it in the war. Instead, they claim it was Armenia who was using the munition to obscure the vision of Azerbaijan’s drones. While these claims can’t be confirmed or denied, it’s unlikely that the Armenian military, which couldn’t even fund its own tiny air force, would have spent money on an expensive munition such as white phosphorus. But Azerbaijan had certainly been using it. I stood alongside medical staff as they treated approximately a dozen soldiers in Yerevan’s hospitals for phosphorus injuries. Chemical tests made its presence incontrovertible.

The Failure of the Diaspora and Armenia’s Westernization Strategy

The Davtashen National Burn Center of Armenia served as an example of just how important the diaspora remains for material aid. There was a group of about five doctors from France who had flown in to assist in whatever way they could, bringing with them several boxes of humanitarian aid. France is also an exception to the general sluggishness with which Western states have responded to diaspora pressure. With a 600,000 strong Armenian diaspora presence, France is one of Armenia’s closest Western allies, and a mediating member in the OSCE Minsk Group, an international body created to solve the crisis of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war. My flight from Toronto to Paris was virtually empty, thanks to the pandemic. But my flight from Paris to Yerevan was almost completely booked. Armenians from all around the world were traveling to repatriate, reconnect with family, and participate in Armenia’s recovery.

Both the French government and Armenians from the diaspora in France have sent a considerable amount of international aid. But Turkish membership in NATO ensures that even willing Western countries remain impotent when it comes to defense aid. Two weeks after the peace deal had been signed, the French senate decided to recognize the independence of Artsakh, to which Armenians with any sense exclaimed, “So what?” Still, it’s more than anyone expects from most other Western countries, including the U.S., which co-chairs the OSCE Minsk Group with France. Azerbaijan’s powerful lobbyists ensure a muted response to the conflict and a steady stream of friendly media articles.

I connected with Tamar Kupeyan, an Armenian-Canadian woman who had been working as a volunteer in Armenia since the war began, collecting donations from the diaspora and distributing them to families in need. One of the families we visited together was a new couple, just married before the war. The husband was now missing his leg and his wife was pregnant. He had been injured by a drone strike in the Jabrayil district, an area now under Azerbaijan’s control. Due to the excess demand for medical care typical of a battlefield hospital, he then had to wait for over 12 hours with no anesthetic before receiving treatment. Even when doing surgeries, anesthesia had to be rationed until foreign aid came in.

The Armenian diaspora is unique in that it is larger than the country itself. The diaspora has a population of around 11 million, while the country itself has just less than 3 million. While many Armenians see the immense influence of the diaspora as a cultural threat to their traditional and conservative mores, the Armenian state would be lost without this satellite patriotism. Repatriation also boosts Armenia’s population, as many diaspora members like Tamar have moved back to Armenia over the years. Even abroad, the diaspora tends to be an incredibly insular group. I observed to Tamar that the Armenians I knew in Toronto tended not to conform much to wider Canadian society; she remarked it was because they were forced out of their country. They didn’t choose to leave, so they remained more attached to their Armenian identity.

But while Armenia’s welcoming of Western influence in the forms of diaspora repatriation and private capital has benefited the country, Western influence in Armenia’s government has had very different results. The outcome of this war proved that Nikol Pashinyan’s strategy of courting the EU was shortsighted and naive for a country whose security is inextricably tied to a strong Russia.

On May 8th, 2018, the national assembly of Armenia elected Pashinyan as prime minister, and on May 14th, Pashinyan joined Putin in Sochi for a meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) member states, an alliance spearheaded by Russia. Concurrently, Pashinyan was leading Armenia’s Yelq bloc, also called the Way Out Alliance, which was composed of three liberal political parties who were united against the country’s EAEU membership. The coalition saw it not only as a threat to Armenian development, but also to resolving the Artsakh dispute. Following the summit in Sochi, Pashinyan made his agenda clear by appointing several officials with strongly anti-Russian track records and associations to his cabinet.

Of these appointments, the one likely most alarming to Moscow was Armen Grigoryan as head of the National Security Council. Grigoryan was formerly the program coordinator of the anti-corruption NGO Transparency International, an organization funded by the Open Society Foundations. Another appointment by Pashinyan was David Sanasaryan as head of the anti-corruption State Control Service. Ironically, Sanasaryan was charged with operating a corruption scheme that enriched his brother’s firm and was removed from office. Pashinyan’s government is not above the cronyism that characterized the old regime, even though they frequently decry it. Sanasaryan has called for the expulsion of a Russian military base and went so far as to throw eggs at the Russian embassy in Yerevan. Pashinyan also appointed several other cabinet members with Soros ties, which Moscow undoubtedly viewed as a threat.

In July of 2019, Armenia adopted the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) implementation roadmap with the EU, a small but non-trivial increase in their partnership. In October 2019, Armenian deputy prime minister Tigran Avinyan said that Armenia now had a “completely different level of relationship with the EU,” and that in the future, joining the EU as a member state would be “a question that the people of Armenia need to answer.”

Joining the EU would mean relinquishing membership in the Russian-led EAEU. The major stated goal of Pashinyan and his supporters was to root out the incessant corruption of the previous regime. But an antagonized Russia perceived them as courting its enemies, and its response left Armenia stranded among hostile neighbors. Since Armenia heavily relies on Iran for trade and Russia for security, the move risked two of the small country’s most important relationships.

The geography of Armenia dictates who the country can realistically rely on. To the west of Armenia is Turkey. Thanks to Armenia’s membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Russia guarantees their defense on this front. To the east is the now-lost buffer zone of Nagorno-Karabakh, followed by Turkey’s client, Azerbaijan. The CSTO never extended to Karabakh, and thus Russia never directly provided Armenia with military support. But the reason Armenians still have a presence there is because Russia finally decided to insert itself in the South Caucasus with this peacekeeping mission. To Armenia’s south is another Western foe: Iran, whose geographic position also means that Armenia is Russia’s corridor to their closest Middle Eastern ally. And to the north is Georgia, which has a permanent Russian presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, thanks to its own failed attempt to realign with the West.

Running beneath these complex alignments is a basic question of identity. Is Armenia a Western country, a former Soviet republic, a uniquely Middle Eastern Christian state, or something else entirely? The question divided those I talked to. The Christian identity of Armenia—overwhelmingly Orthodox—naturally aligns it with both Russia and Europe. There’s also a cultural element: everywhere I went, cabbies played Western music, bars had Western-themed decor, and the leading fashion brands were from Western cities. But the case made by Armenia’s pro-Western voices goes beyond religion or pop culture.

For Avetis Muradyan, my fellow Palladium writer, the whole thing was hardly a question. “Armenia is European, and always has been,” he said as we discussed the topic. “Armenia was Hellenized in antiquity. Since then, Armenian culture has always looked to Europe as its point of reference. And it does this to the detriment of its neighbors.” But, I pointed out, dwelling on ancient history like this is practically a requirement for any nation-state. What about its modern culture?

“While Armenia was forming its modern identity—this was from roughly the 18th to the 20th centuries—all major Armenian elites were educated in Europe,” he recounted. “Aivazovsky was educated at Saint Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Arts; Komitas, the great musicologist who preserved Armenia’s song traditions, was educated in Berlin; Prince Valerian Madatov, when he was a boy, got sent to the court of Catherine the Great. Ironically, that was done by Nagorno-Karabakh’s nobility, and their goal was to bring the Caucasus under Russian rule. Even the first prints in the Armenian language come from Venice.”

History aside, I noted that, during my travels, pro-European sentiments seemed to have a more modern concern. Specifically, they reflected frustration with corruption and a desire for a sense of democratic accountability. “That’s true, and it’s not new,” Avetis replied, “The cultural affinity has always made Armenia a fertile ground for European ideas. In the 19th century, it was romanticism and nationalism. In the 21st, it’s democracy and the rule of law.”

But for others, to laud and encourage the creeping influence of Western culture, governments, and NGOs in Armenia was nothing short of offensive. This view, in my experience, correlated with a greater suspicion of the diaspora’s Westernized influence, and a more socially traditionalist lens on Armenian identity.

“The identities of many European nations were assembled centuries after Armenians had already developed a cohesive language and culture,” said Armen Kaprelian, a local friend and researcher in Armenia’s Ministry of Economy. “Our roots are decidedly distinct from Europe—especially Western Europe. We’re more similar to Persians and Assyrians. On the far end, we’re perhaps even similar to Slavs, Jews, and Kurds.” I asked Armen about the Soviet legacy in Armenia, especially in light of its relationship with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. “Most of the notable Armenian intellectuals of the modern era got their education under the USSR. The Armenian SSR was a training ground for many of the top Soviet mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and so on. Some of that generation still runs our universities today, and our best thinkers are products of the Soviet heritage.” I noted that, like Russia, it seemed like many of those people left after 1991. “Unfortunately, after the collapse of the USSR, Armenia experienced a period of brain-drain,” he concurred. “A lot of people fled to Russia or elsewhere. Nowadays, Armenia still has its strongest academic ties to Russia. European and U.S. institutions have started making inroads, but only recently.”

In practice, though, it’s the hard realities of geopolitics and institutional strength which will determine Armenia’s alignment. Corruption, which characterized the old regime, is often seen as synonymous with influence from Moscow. It may not be realistic for Armenia to cozy up to the West, but pro-European voices can point to the dangers of state stagnation as a worse alternative.

While Russian dominance of Armenia’s domestic political affairs is unavoidable in the short-term, the reality is that Russia is in a precipitous long-term decline. Russian foreign policy in the last two decades has spread Russian forces thin across several fronts and mainly achieved residual or symbolic victories. Its ostensible victory in Syria has yielded only a small sliver of land on the coast of the Mediterranean, where they now have a militarily obsolete naval base surrounded by NATO navies. Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has rendered Georgia permanently hostile to it. Georgia now functions as a Turkish satellite that hosts the oil and gas pipelines between Azerbaijan and Turkey. Ukraine, another former Russian satellite, has been permanently lost to Western influence, with nothing more than a frozen conflict and an increasingly hawkish NATO to show for it. While the victory in Crimea is more useful than Russia’s other interventions, it may also be the cap of Russia’s expected gains in the region. Putin has a legally and politically secure position for the foreseeable future, but it’s not at all clear whether a competent successor will come to the fore.

The problem for Armenia’s pro-European factions is that Russian decline may be underway, but Russian collapse certainly isn’t. Culturally, the country has recovered a degree of cohesion and resilience. The recent unrest catalyzed by the arrest of Alexei Navalny, the chief opposition leader to Putin, could form clusters of insurrection. But the Kremlin seems basically able to crush these, and willing to endure the feedback loop of unrest. The West mainly expresses its hawkish tendencies toward Russia through sanctions, not military power. Russia might not be strong enough to dominate for the next hundred years, but it certainly seems able to handle the next decade.

For the moment, the question is whether it’s committed to staying. With Russian peacekeeping forces spread thin across many fronts—Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, and now Artsakh—this could be the first time that a Russian peacekeeping presence doesn’t become permanent. That would mean disaster for the remnants of Artsakh. And with no nominally pro-Armenian Western power realistically stepping in, that leaves Russia as the least-worst option for many Armenians, for whom the real threat is Azerbaijani expansion backed by Turkish military aid.

Azerbaijan and the Rise of Turkey

On December 11th, Azerbaijan held a victory parade in its capital of Baku, which was attended by Erdogan and members of the Turkish armed forces. In his speech, Erdogan praised the spirit of Enver Pasha, the powerful Ottoman general who was also the architect of the Armenian genocide: “Today, may the souls of Nuri Pasha, Enver Pasha, and the brave soldiers of the Caucasus Islam Army, be happy.” For his part, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev claimed the Armenian capital of Yerevan to be their historical lands: “During the war, I said that our iron fist embodies both our unity and strength. That iron fist broke the enemy’s spine and crushed the enemy’s head. After that, if Armenian fascism ever raises its head again, the result will be the same.”

Adding to the list of provocations was a set of postage stamps Azerbaijan released on January 12th, depicting the fumigation of Karabakh. While Azerbaijan claims that this hybrid of soldier and exterminator is a testament to both the country’s fight against COVID-19 and Armenia, the symbolism is not lost on either Armenia or the Azerbaijani public. One Azerbaijani Twitter user posted a photo of the stamps with the caption, “If a cockroach was born in the kitchen, this does not mean the kitchen belongs to him.”

The stamp’s graphics show this fumigation happening in the southern Armenian province of Syunik. Syunik is a critically important strategic area both for Russia and Turkey. For Russia, it is their direct access path to Iran. For Turkey, it is their missing link into Azerbaijan, and then past the Caspian Sea into Central Asia, and ultimately China. This also makes the route valuable to China’s ongoing Belt and Road Initiative. But the strategic relevance of the location may prove Azerbaijan’s undoing as well. Despite Aliyev’s bombastic talk of Azerbaijani power, the fact is that his decisions increasingly need approval in Ankara. I discussed Azerbaijan’s victory with Eric Hacopian, an Armenian-American consultant who explained that Azerbaijan had given up a large degree of autonomy to reclaim this territory: “Aliyev’s victory is at the price of having two worms in his apple: Russia and Turkey. And both have a much larger appetite than him.”

Azerbaijan’s regime is a semi-hereditary affair, at least unofficially. In 2003, Ilham Aliyev was elected president of Azerbaijan following the death of his father, then-President Heydar Aliyev. The Aliyev dynasty has been in firm control of the country since 1993, when Heydar Aliyev was elected president following a referendum to end the brief one-year rule of Abulafaz Elchibey and his party, the Popular Front of Azerbaijan. Heydar Aliyev had been governing the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic—an Azerbaijani exclave which is separated from the rest of the country by Armenia—without interference from the mainland government in Baku since 1991. In 1993, Armenian forces captured Shushi—called Shusha in Azerbaijani, and the last Azerbaijani-populated stronghold in Nagorno-Karabakh at the time. Following his election, the elder Aliyev was forced to sign a ceasefire which fully surrendered the mainly Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, along with seven surrounding provinces. Together, they constituted the inception of the independent Republic of Artsakh.

While Azerbaijan’s ostensible motivation for retaking Karabakh was reclaiming a traditional and sacred cultural land, the establishment of new lucrative trade routes was excellent leverage for the country to gain support from its key allies. On January 11th, Pashinyan and Aliyev joined Putin in Moscow for the first time since the war started to discuss the future of the region. They came away signing a joint statement, which included an agreement to establish new trade links.

Turkey will now be directly connected to Azerbaijan through Nakhchivan and the Syunik province, via a transport corridor agreed on in the November 9th peace agreement. The corridor will go through the south of Karabakh, across the lands captured during the war. Another railway will connect Armenia and Russia to Iran, with Russia passing through Baku and circumventing Georgia. The new corridors will benefit Russia immensely. Georgia is the notable loser, but Iran hasn’t gotten a great deal either. In the long-run, Turkey and Azerbaijan aim to decrease the reliance they had on trading through Iran while the conflict went on. In the new regional order, they can now go through the Syunik province of Armenia and through Nakhchivan.

Since taking power in 2003, the younger Aliyev has been very successful in building up the Azerbaijani state by forming relationships and maintaining leverage over several world powers who are competing against each other. Despite having a security pact with Armenia, Russia is still very much intent on maintaining influence in Azerbaijan—hence their establishment of a new trade route that passes through Baku, and the sale of weapons to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan also sells a large amount of natural gas to Israel, which offers them weapons in return.

A year after Aliyev took office in 2004, Azerbaijan became part of the EU’s European Neighborhood Policy, which looks to include eastern and southern neighbors in Europe’s orbit. While Armenia is also part of this policy, Azerbaijan has been able to form closer ties with the EU by creating a gas pipeline called the Southern Gas Corridor, which passes through Georgia and Turkey, and directly competes with Russia in the European gas market. This project was finally completed on the last day of 2020. Azerbaijan’s strategy of containing its enemies by making them friends is similar to that of other Eurasian states; Kazakhstan, for example, has China, Russia, and the United States all leveraged in its favor via its oil and minerals. Armenia simply isn’t able to exert the same amount of leverage as Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan over its neighbors because Armenia’s natural resources pale in comparison to Azerbaijan’s oil and gas, which make up 90% of the country’s total exports.

On January 7th, Aliyev lamented a visit to Stepanakert—called Khankendi in Azerbaijani—by the Armenian foreign minister as a “provocative step,” and to remember that “[our] iron fist remains in place.” He also declared, “The whole world recognizes this territory as an integral part of Azerbaijan. No foreign citizen can enter this zone without our permission.” The first part of his statement is true; Karabakh is an internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan, and Armenia is seen to have occupied the territory for over 30 years.

But it isn’t true that people need permission from Baku to enter the territory. The very Russian peacekeeping operation which helped make his comments possible is now the main enforcer in the region. The November 9th peace deal stipulated that Azerbaijan must allow safe passage for Armenians to Stepanakert via Lachin. There was never any thought of needing to acquire permission from Baku. I was given permission by the Artsakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and by the Russian peacekeepers who let me through the checkpoints.

The Road Into Artsakh

While driving towards Nagorno-Karabakh, we hugged the northern border of Nakhchivan while traveling east towards the Lachin corridor, which is now the only way to enter the region from the Armenian side. When there isn’t a mountainside directly adjacent to the highway, it is protected by a prolonged barrier of earth, with intermittent sniper positions that peer into Nakhchivan. The strange border demarcations of Armenia and Azerbaijan, with little patches of one country within the other, are a reminder of the many unresolved conflicts between the two nations, who increasingly see each other’s annihilation as indispensable to their own survival. But Armenia is deeply traumatized from this war, merely hoping they can maintain the already disastrous terms of the peace deal, while Azerbaijan’s appetite for Armenian land seems boundless.

The Lachin corridor is a treacherous path of nearly 40 miles from Goris to Stepanakert, which passes through newly captured Azerbaijani territory in the Shushi region. It is named after the town of Lachin, the last population center one encounters before making the steep ascent into mountainous Karabakh. The town is also referred to as Berdzor, an Armenian name, while Lachin is Turkish. The names of many of these places change when the territory itself changes control.

To make the journey, I needed press accreditation and a special visa for the region. After clearing those hurdles, I asked my contact in Artsakh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs if I could accompany a group of refugees returning home from Yerevan to Stepanakert with a Russian military escort. Armen Kaprelian, my economist friend, offered to make the trip with me. His perfect English made him an indispensable companion.

Unfortunately, the government had given us bad information about the convoy’s departure, and we eventually decided to make our own way to Stepanakert. Our driver, who asked that his name be omitted, had made this treacherous, winding journey along the Lachin Corridor since the beginning of the war. When the war still raged hot, he drove the route with his lights out to avoid drone strikes. Though that period is technically over, the shooting has not really ended. It continues along disputed land demarcations and rebel holdouts, which are finally being weeded out by Azerbaijan. The cost of our journey was 40,000 Dram, or nearly $80 USD. That would be enough for someone in Armenia to pay all their monthly utility bills.

When entering the Lachin corridor, there used to be a sign with the red, orange, and blue Armenian tricolor flag. That has now been replaced with the red, white, and blue of the Russians, indicating that for all intents and purposes, this area is under Russian control. When arriving in Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh, the Russian flag is seen just as often as the Artsakh flag. The checkpoints were a breeze–we had all the right paperwork, and our driver was a regular.

But what makes this drive so risky is that in order to access what is left of Artsakh, you have to pass through newly captured Azerbaijani territory. I asked our driver about encountering Azerbaijanis or any Turkish presence on this route, and if he was armed just in case. He pulled out a large knife from the crack between his seat and gear shift where I usually lose my phone. The bit of Azerbaijani territory you need to pass through is in the Shushi region, right before Stepanakert. Shushi is a fortress that sits on top of a mountain overlooking Stepanakert, and as such is a strategically important city. Stepanakert in turn is highly susceptible to artillery barrage because of its valley location.

In Armenian journalist Garin Hovannisian’s book Family of Shadows, he talks about a time when his father, the first Armenian foreign minister, visited Shushi in 1987: “A couple of frightened Azerbaijani boys were running away from the camera, but my father was following them. ‘This is Shushi, my boys, there are no Armenians here. But one day, one day, the Armenians will come.'” The city is known as the beating heart of Karabakh and has traded hands several times throughout the centuries. In 1920, Armenians were expelled; in 1992 it was the Azerbaijanis. This year, it was Armenia’s turn once again. Since the end of the war, Pashinyan has stated that Shushi was a majority Azerbaijani stronghold prior to the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, and that it was a miserable and neglected place. Such statements have fueled accusations of Pashinyan betraying Armenia, and there are many reports that Armenian forces were told to retreat from the city despite having managed to hold it. Back in Yerevan, protests include thundering chants of “Nikol Davachan!”, meaning “Nikol the traitor.”

When passing through Shushi, my driver told me not to take pictures of the Azerbaijani soldiers, who he then proceeded to curse out as we drove by. The stalemate at this checkpoint shows how the war is still completely unresolved, and the new border demarcations are absolutely unsustainable. This was confirmed a few days after the peace deal by Putin: “The Karabakh question still hasn’t been answered.” While Azerbaijan is nominally in control of Shushi, Russia has established a military base there, and the peace deal stipulates that Azerbaijan must allow Armenians to travel through the region unharmed. This is necessary for anyone wanting to access Stepanakert and the rest of Armenian-populated, Russian-controlled Karabakh, which stretches to the eastern Martuni region. Despite formally being in the hands of Azerbaijan, Russian peacekeepers control all the access points to Shushi, and everyone I spoke with in Artsakh seemed to think it wouldn’t be in Azerbaijani control for long, as Russian forces could starve the city of resources or take it by force. But while Russia surrounds Shushi, Azerbaijan surrounds Russia.

Only a few years ago, a new road was built which connected Armenia to Artsakh through the northern Kelbajar region, a path which rivals the beauty of the Swiss Alps. But that territory was ceded to Azerbaijan in the November 9th peace deal. Azerbaijan was unstoppable in its campaign in the southern part of Karabakh, which ended once it captured Shushi on November 8th. Despite Armenia being able to hold its own in the north, it was still forced to relinquish control of these territories. This means that the Russian peacekeeping presence, as well as the Armenians still living in Artsakh, are surrounded by Azerbaijani forces.

Once in Artsakh, we took the long way from Stepanakert to Martuni and gazed at Shushi across the valley. From a distance, the steeple of the historic Ghazanchetsots cathedral could be seen. Local Armenians have accused the Azerbaijanis of desecrating it; Azerbaijan, whose soldiers barbecued in the church following its capture, won’t allow UNESCO to inspect it. Adjacent to Shushi, Stepanakert could be seen sitting in the valley. Looking down upon the city, it was now obvious to me why Artsakh’s capital is such a vulnerable military target.

The remnants of Armenian-controlled Karabakh stretch from Stepanakert to the eastern village of Martuni, which is less than 6 miles from the border with Azerbaijan. The damage in Martuni was extremely widespread.

As our new driver hadn’t been to Martuni since the war began, we paid a visit to his sister and her family. All the windows in her house had just been replaced after being blown out from the shelling, a common result of artillery attacks. Despite the travails of living in a war zone, they remained cheerful and extended gracious hospitality. The stoicism of the villagers was impressive given the circumstances.

We talked to some other villagers as well. One man directed us to a cratered-out home that had suffered a direct hit. An excavator was needed to find the body of his neighbor.

Another woman had fled her home, only to return to it as mostly rubble. She hadn’t lost any family in the war, but her son was injured, and he was at that time in a hospital in Goris. Unfortunately, she had recently taken out a loan on this property and still had to repay it. In total, 13 villagers who couldn’t escape in time were killed by Azerbaijani shelling in Martuni.

The further I traveled into the region, the more vitriolic and distrustful Armenians were of Pashinyan. Somewhere between Stepanakert and Martuni, we pulled over to speak with some soldiers who had fought in the war. Both had been injured, and neither were fans of the prime minister. “Fuck Pashinyan!” declared one. “Pashinyan is like a balloon,” the other quickly followed up. “If you blow, he flies away.” These soldiers hadn’t lost their homes, but they were now surrounded by Azerbaijanis.

Pashinyan supposedly signed the peace agreement under duress and has consistently laid blame on the previous regime for neglecting Armenia’s armed forces. In reality, neither government procured the appropriate military equipment to challenge Azerbaijan, which despite spending half as much as Armenia as a percentage of state expenditures, spent nearly four times more in dollar terms in 2020. I talked with Matthew Winchester-Arlow, an open-source intelligence analyst who posts most of his work on Instagram: “Azerbaijan acquired drones, Sandcat APCs, and loitering munitions, while Armenia wasted money on the Su-30SM fighter jets that they didn’t have munitions for and which took the place of anti-aircraft defenses,” he explained.“Even their military tactics reflected outmoded Soviet-era doctrine. Problem was, they didn’t have the support structure of the actual USSR which those tactics assumed.”

Mistakes of the past regime aside, Pashinyan was in charge when the war broke out, and his government mismanaged the Armenian armed forces throughout it. Colonel-General Movses Hakobyan resigned his position as head of the Military Control Service on November 19th, issuing a statement alleging that by October 30th, only 72% of Artsakh’s military and 52% of Armenian reservists had been mobilized. This meant that approximately 200,000 Armenian soldiers were not deployed to the frontlines. A leaked Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) intelligence report showed that Pashinyan’s government was warned in advance of an imminent attack from Azerbaijan, and chose to ignore it. These discoveries have resulted in growing anger at the Armenian government’s failures, and at perceived traitors in Armenian institutions, including the military.

When returning to Armenia proper on the Lachin corridor, we were confronted by the reality of travel in a warzone. As we drove through newly captured Azerbaijani territory just south of Shushi, a nondescript van parked at the side of the road pulled out as we passed and began to trail us. We wondered aloud what reason it might have for following us. Our driver—the same who had brought us into Artsakh—stared into the rearview mirror. “They look like Turks,” he said under his breath, and hit the gas. Our unwanted companions kept pace. Luckily, we were just a couple kilometers from a Russian checkpoint. As we approached, the van backed off. Our driver pulled up and told the guard what had happened, demanding that he question the driver and prevent any Turks or Azerbaijanis from entering Armenia. From behind us, I could see the van approaching the checkpoint with its hazard lights flashing. The peacekeeper stepped into the road to confront it. We didn’t stick around to listen in. Taking advantage of the extra time, we sped off towards the safe territory of Armenia proper.

Given that we were so close to a Russian checkpoint, a planned attack seemed unlikely. The Russians have made the threat of mortal danger a very small possibility since they established jurisdiction of this route. But our mysterious followers certainly wanted to announce their presence, and in a decidedly unfriendly manner. The ceasefire agreement requires Azerbaijan to provide a safe passageway for Armenians to and from Artsakh through the Lachin Corridor. Perhaps the goal of our followers was to discourage anyone from making the trip, regardless of what the peace deal might say.

If successful, such tactics could slowly cut off Artsakh from Armenia, since the survival of what remains of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh now depends entirely on this one dangerous overland route. A new road has been promised by the peace deal which circumvents Shushi, but there is no expectation as to when it will be finished.

While Armenia has suffered a massive defeat, the new trade routes may end up being the first step to normalizing relations with Azerbaijan and generating capital inflows. A mutually beneficial trade agreement might be the only way that Armenia and Azerbaijan can cooperate in the future. But these new railways might just as easily be used to facilitate an arms race for the next war. Whether in the Syunik province or in Nagorno-Karabakh, another war is inevitable—likely in both regions, but certainly in the latter.

What comes next for Armenia is a decision between Western-style democracy or immediate security. Armenia will, at the very least, be a vassal of Russia for the foreseeable future. Its choice is whether to do so begrudgingly or to fully accede to Russian power as a core part of its survival strategy. Given Russia’s potential long-run decline, this may end up a geopolitical devil’s bargain. Armenia would secure its immediate position, but only for so long as Russia remains willing and able to involve itself in the region. Should that change, Armenia may end up even weaker in the long-run, and surrounded by even bolder and more powerful enemies than it is now. Despite the heavy cost, the immediate survival of the Armenian state is likely preferable to being dominated by Turkey and its allies. Just like the end of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, the current peace deal has only brought about more questions than answers. The direct involvement of Russia and Turkey makes this stalemate even more precarious and convoluted than the first.

Going forward, there will be some tentative peace and continued diplomatic negotiations. Armenians in Artsakh will continue to live in this Russian-controlled and Azerbaijani-surrounded enclave in Karabakh, but many see the writing on the wall and are fleeing to safe havens such as Yerevan or Tbilisi. Russian peacekeepers will regain control and guarantee the protection of this dreary territory—likely for the next 5 years, as that is the initial agreement for Russia’s peacekeeping operation. However, Artsakh may hold the unenviable accolade of being the first territory where Russia pulls out of a peacekeeping mission, deciding it isn’t worth it to stay surrounded indefinitely. When the parties involved have fully exhausted diplomatic options, the table will be set for the next war. In many ways it already is. There are far too many tripwires, with no way to disarm them.