Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not play out the way Russian President Vladimir Putin had hoped, but it is proving an unimagined boon for his fellow authoritarian leader in neighboring Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has never been as politically secure as he is today.
Sadly, that success is just adding to evidence, if more were needed, that when dictators feel strong, they tend to use their increased confidence for repression rather than for political and economic reform. Aliyev has won big from Russia’s invasion on multiple fronts. In July last year he signed a deal with the EU to double natural gas exports to the bloc, as it scrambled for new energy sources to fill the void left by Russian supplies lost to sanctions. New infrastructure has to be built to make that possible, but increased sales and prices together raised revenue from the ex-Soviet nation’s oil and gas sectors from US$19.5 billion in 2021 to US$35 billion last year. Those fossil fuels accounted for more than 92 percent of Azerbaijan’s exports and over half the state budget.
A distracted Russia, the traditional security provider for Azerbaijan’s archrival Armenia, also gave Aliyev the space to overrun the ethnic Armenian-controlled enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, ending 30 years of war and humiliation with precisely the kind of short and glorious military victory Putin aimed to achieve in Ukraine. The Armenian population’s mass flight resolved the Karabakh question for good and met a public desire for revenge — unacceptable as that is — following similar previous bouts of ethnic cleansing against the Azeris in the enclave and its surrounding provinces. A triumphant Aliyev has called for early elections next year to capitalize on the patriotic euphoria, setting the stage for his third decade in power.
Illustration: Yusha
Everybody, it seems, now needs Aliyev. The EU not only wants his energy, but is also conscious that Azerbaijan controls the only viable route for the bloc to access the resources and energy markets of Central Asia without raising the ire of Russia or Iran, both now hostile and under sanctions. The US similarly sees Azerbaijan’s geopolitical value rising — the worse Washington’s relations with Moscow and Tehran become — despite misgivings over Karabakh’s ethnic cleansing. So too, for the inverse reason, do Russia and Iran. Moscow was once a partisan backer of Armenia, yet that relationship has been overridden. Putin needs Azerbaijan’s cooperation as European sanctions force him to shift trade and energy routes eastward, and Russia’s military capacity to dictate events in the Caucasus is in any case tied up elsewhere.
Iran, long a prickly neighbor that is politically close to Armenia, has also been courting Baku. In October, Tehran proposed hosting a transit corridor that would connect Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan, a province that is separated from the rest of the country by part of Armenia. Improved cooperation has become more important to Iran since it agreed with Moscow earlier in May to build a multibillion-dollar rail connection through Azerbaijan, part of the so-called “North-South Transport Corridor” from Russia, as the Kremlin seeks new non-European markets.
From this already high base, things are looking up for Aliyev. Azerbaijan just locked up the right to hold the next global summit on climate change — COP29. Obstacles to its bid fell away like phantoms in a mist in recent weeks, even though Azerbaijan’s poor human rights record and status as yet another fossil-fuel-producing host might look like handicaps. Protocol required the climate summit to go to a country in eastern Europe, and that pool shrank dramatically as soon as Putin made clear that he would veto any bid by a government that supports Ukraine’s war effort. Only Armenia, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria remained in the race. Armenia dropped out on Dec. 7 as part of a deal in which the two sides agreed to exchange prisoners. A day later, Bulgaria, a potential beneficiary from new Azerbaijan-Europe gas transit flows, also quit.
All of this success and confidence should create an opportunity for Aliyev to loosen control over a society that has been under growing repression since his father, Heydar Aliyev, a Communist-era KGB chief and party leader of Azerbaijan, won election to the presidency in 1993. The latest Freedom House report classes the Caucasus nation of 10 million as a “consolidated autocracy” and kleptocracy that scores a rock bottom one out of seven for democracy.
Rather than reverse that trend, the government last year introduced a law requiring media entities to register with the state, and promptly refused to license those it disliked. A list of political prisoners maintained by two Azeri nonprofits, the Institute for Peace and Democracy and the Center for Monitoring Political Prisoners, counted 254 as of Dec. 1 — an increase of 19 since October, including journalists investigating regime corruption — up from 99 a year earlier.
The combination of Aliyev’s triumphalism and anger over criticism, in particular from the US, of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic cleansing makes it hard to imagine his bending to international pressure right now. Yet his strength ultimately lies in Azerbaijan’s value to European energy markets; his country has no interest in being left alone to deal with its much larger Russian and Iranian neighbors over the long term, especially should Putin turn the tide in Ukraine. Aliyev is also well aware that he needs to wean the economy off its overreliance on energy to raise living standards and long-term growth prospects.
The fastest way to achieve that last goal would be to secure help and investment from Europe. Success would require significant reforms to break down what the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has called Azerbaijan’s “monopolistic vested interests,” but would also do more to secure Aliyev’s position than jailing or silencing any number of his critics ever could. Who knows, he might even win genuine elections. It is time to remind him of that.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. With assistance from Elaine He and Demetrios Pogkas.
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