Phase I
Russia absorbed the Caucasus over a long century: Georgia annexed from 1801, the Persian khanates of the eastern Caucasus — including Karabakh, Erivan and Nakhchivan — ceded by treaty in 1813 and 1828, and the mountain North Caucasus conquered only after decades of war against Imam Shamil's imamate, ending in 1859 in Chechnya and Dagestan and in 1864 with the expulsion of most of the Circassian population to the Ottoman Empire.
Phase II
The First World War destroyed the imperial order.
Phase III
Soviet nationality policy drew the map the region still fights over.
Phase IV
Glasnost let the stored questions speak.
Phase V
Three wars ran concurrently.
Phase VI
Russia's own southern war ran on a different track.
Phase VII
While the ceasefires held, the region acquired its economic geometry.
Phase VIII
In August 2008, after months of escalation and shelling around Tskhinvali, Georgia's attempt to retake South Ossetia met a prepared Russian counter-invasion that reached deep into uncontested Georgia within five days.
Phase IX
The decade between the wars was quieter, not quiet.
Phase X
On 27 September 2020 Azerbaijan launched a full offensive.
Phase XI
Russia's invasion of Ukraine consumed the guarantor's attention and credibility, and Baku moved through the opening.
Phase XII
With the battlefield questions settled in Baku's favour, the region moved to paper.
Russia absorbed the Caucasus over a long century: Georgia annexed from 1801, the Persian khanates of the eastern Caucasus — including Karabakh, Erivan and Nakhchivan — ceded by treaty in 1813 and 1828, and the mountain North Caucasus conquered only after decades of war against Imam Shamil's imamate, ending in 1859 in Chechnya and Dagestan and in 1864 with the expulsion of most of the Circassian population to the Ottoman Empire. Imperial administration then layered new borders, oil-boom Baku, and large population movements over an already mixed region — and imperial collapse in 1905 produced the first mass Armenian–Azerbaijani intercommunal violence in the same cities that would burn again in 1988–90.
Every later conflict in this module runs along lines laid down in the imperial century: which communities lived where, which had been moved or expelled, and how the metropole managed difference. The North Caucasus entered Russia by conquest within living memory of 1917 — a fact Chechnya's twentieth century never stopped reflecting.
The First World War destroyed the imperial order. In 1915 the Ottoman government carried out the genocide of its Armenian population — established by the overwhelming weight of historical scholarship, and disputed by Türkiye — an event that stands behind Armenian threat perception to this day. When Russian power collapsed, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia declared independence in May 1918 and immediately fought over the mixed districts between them: Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhchivan. The Red Army ended the experiment — Baku taken in April 1920, Yerevan by December, Tbilisi in February–March 1921 — and the treaties of Moscow and Kars (1921) fixed the Turkish–Soviet frontier, including Nakhchivan's status as an Azerbaijani exclave, in the form it still holds.
The 1918–21 wars are the direct ancestors of 1988–2023: the same districts, the same demographic arguments, the same reach for outside patrons. They ended not in settlement but in conquest — which meant the questions were stored, not answered.
Soviet nationality policy drew the map the region still fights over. In July 1921 the party's Caucasus Bureau resolved to leave mountainous Karabakh inside Soviet Azerbaijan; in 1923 it became the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast — an Armenian-majority autonomy inside the Azerbaijani republic, a compromise that satisfied neither side and outlived the state that made it. Abkhazia's status was stepped down from treaty republic to autonomy inside Georgia in 1931; South Ossetia was an autonomous oblast inside Georgia mirrored by North Ossetia inside Russia. In February 1944 the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples — with the Karachay, Balkars and others — were deported to Central Asia at enormous cost in lives, their republic abolished until 1957. The autonomies gave every grievance an institutional address; the deportations gave the North Caucasus a collective memory of existential threat.
Soviet autonomy was a storage system for national questions: it kept them administratively alive and politically frozen at once. When the centre weakened, every autonomy became a ready-made state project — and every boundary between them a potential front.
Glasnost let the stored questions speak. In February 1988 the NKAO soviet voted to request transfer to Soviet Armenia, and mass movements rose in Yerevan and Stepanakert; within days, anti-Armenian pogroms in Sumgait killed dozens and set the conflict's violent pattern. Population flight in both directions followed — Armenians from Azerbaijan, Azerbaijanis from Armenia — punctuated by the January 1990 Baku pogrom and the Soviet army's lethal intervention that followed. In Georgia, Soviet troops killed nineteen demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989, radicalising the independence movement whose own nationalism in turn alarmed Abkhazia and South Ossetia. By the failed August 1991 coup, the region's wars were already in motion under a state that no longer functioned.
The violence preceded the state collapse, not the reverse: by the time the USSR legally dissolved, displacement and pogrom had already made the mixed cities unmixed. The wars of the 1990s ratified separations that 1988–90 had begun.
Three wars ran concurrently. In South Ossetia, fighting from January 1991 ended with the June 1992 Sochi agreement and a Russian-led peacekeeping format. In Karabakh, full war from early 1992 — including the killing of hundreds of Azerbaijani civilians fleeing Khojaly in February — ended with the May 1994 Bishkek ceasefire, with Armenian forces holding the former NKAO and seven surrounding Azerbaijani districts, and roughly three-quarters of a million Azerbaijanis displaced. In Abkhazia, war from August 1992 ended with the fall of Sukhumi in September 1993 and the expulsion of most of the Georgian population — some 200,000–250,000 people. Each ceasefire left a de facto entity, a displaced population, and a Russian role written into the security architecture.
The 1990s settlements were ceasefires, not resolutions — lines where the fighting stopped, administered by whoever held them, guaranteed by the power that brokered them. Everything after 2008 is the unfreezing of arrangements that were never designed to last.
Russia's own southern war ran on a different track. The first Chechen war (1994–96) ended in Russian withdrawal under the Khasavyurt accord — a de facto independent Chechnya that collapsed into disorder. The second war, from 1999 under Vladimir Putin's rising leadership, destroyed Grozny, killed tens of thousands, and shaded into a decade of insurgency and terrorism that reached Moscow theatres and, in 2004, a school in Beslan. Moscow's answer was "Chechenisation": power devolved to the Kadyrov family — Akhmat, assassinated in 2004, then Ramzan from 2007 — in exchange for loyalty, federal money and a free hand. The insurgency's remnant migrated toward jihadism and Dagestan; the formal counter-terrorism operation ended in 2009.
Chechnya is treated in this module as power-structure context, not an active front: the wars are over, but the settlement is personal rather than institutional. A stability that depends on one man's arrangement with one president is a standing question about what follows either of them.
While the ceasefires held, the region acquired its economic geometry. Western-backed routes deliberately bypassing both Russia and Iran were built from Caspian fields to Turkish and Georgian coasts: the Baku–Supsa line in 1999, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline in 2006, and the South Caucasus gas pipeline alongside it. Georgia became a transit state; Azerbaijan became an energy power with revenue to re-arm; Armenia, bypassed by every route, deepened its dependence on Russia and its trade through Iran and Georgia. The OSCE Minsk Group mediated Karabakh without result. The frozen conflicts and the pipelines grew up together — and the 2008 war would demonstrate how little the second protected against the first.
The corridors were built around the conflicts rather than through them — an engineering answer to a political problem. It worked as engineering: the lines pump. It failed as politics: bypassing Armenia hardened the region's division into connected winners and an isolated loser, a geometry the current corridor diplomacy is trying to reverse.
In August 2008, after months of escalation and shelling around Tskhinvali, Georgia's attempt to retake South Ossetia met a prepared Russian counter-invasion that reached deep into uncontested Georgia within five days. The EU-mediated ceasefire froze new realities: Russia recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, garrisoned both, and ended the pretence of peacekeeping neutrality; Georgia broke relations with Moscow; the EU deployed a monitoring mission that the de facto authorities have never admitted. The EU's independent inquiry found Georgia opened the assault on Tskhinvali after long provocation, within a conflict both sides had prepared. It was the first war between Russia and a post-Soviet state — the precedent every later one recalls.
2008 converted two frozen conflicts into instruments of Russian policy: recognition made the entities dependencies, and the garrisons made the boundary lines levers. It also set the precedent — force revises the post-Soviet map — that Ukraine would test at full scale.
The decade between the wars was quieter, not quiet. Azerbaijan's military spending, fed by oil, overtook Armenia's entire state budget in some years; the 2016 Four-Day War over Karabakh — the worst fighting since 1994 — showed Baku's new capability and Moscow's ambiguous brokerage. Armenia's 2018 Velvet Revolution brought Nikol Pashinyan to power on a domestic anti-corruption mandate that Moscow distrusted from the start. Georgia rebuilt westward — association agreement, visa-free travel — while its Georgian Dream government slowly centralised. The Karabakh status quo looked stable and was not: negotiation had produced nothing an Azerbaijani leadership sensed it could now change by force.
Frozen conflicts do not stay frozen when the balance beneath them moves. The decade's real event was the silent one — the widening Azerbaijan–Armenia capability gap — which made 2020 less a surprise than a scheduled correction.
On 27 September 2020 Azerbaijan launched a full offensive. Six weeks of war — decided by Turkish-supplied drones, Israeli loitering munitions and artillery mass against entrenched but under-equipped Armenian forces — ended with the fall of Shusha and the Russian-brokered trilateral statement of 10 November: Azerbaijan kept its battlefield gains and recovered the seven surrounding districts; a Russian peacekeeping contingent deployed along the Lachin corridor and the remnant Armenian-populated zone. Thousands died on both sides. The settlement made Russia the guarantor of what remained — a role it would hold for less than four years — and made Türkiye, for the first time since 1921, a formal party to the region's security order.
2020 ended the post-1994 order and previewed the drone-and-precision warfare Ukraine would make universal. Its settlement contained its own sequel: a peacekeeping mandate without enforcement teeth, and a corridor clause each side read as a different promise.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine consumed the guarantor's attention and credibility, and Baku moved through the opening. From December 2022 the Lachin corridor — the remnant enclave's one road to Armenia — was blockaded, first by government-aligned activists, then by a formal checkpoint, degrading food, fuel and medicine for months. On 19–20 September 2023 a one-day Azerbaijani offensive broke the enclave's forces; within two weeks over 100,000 Karabakh Armenians — effectively the entire population — fled to Armenia, and the de facto republic's institutions were dissolved by 1 January 2024. Russian peacekeepers stood aside, then withdrew entirely by June 2024, ahead of mandate. Armenia froze its CSTO participation and turned visibly west; the EU put a civilian mission on its border.
The Karabakh question that organised Armenian and Azerbaijani politics for a century was closed by force and demography in under a year — the region's clearest demonstration that Russia's guarantees are only as good as Russia's bandwidth. What was not closed: the displaced population's claims, the heritage under new control, and the precedent.
With the battlefield questions settled in Baku's favour, the region moved to paper. Armenia and Azerbaijan announced an agreed draft peace treaty text in March 2025; at a Washington summit on 8 August 2025 the two foreign ministers initialled the agreement while the two leaders signed a joint declaration, which endorsed a US-associated transit arrangement across Armenia's Syunik province under the name Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Baku has continued to use its own older term, "Zangezur corridor", for a connection it has long framed as extraterritorial; the two are not the same proposition and this module does not treat them as one. TRIPP then accumulated instruments — an Armenia–US implementation framework in January 2026 that widened its scope from road and rail to a multimodal programme, a framework agreement initialled in May and signed in June 2026, engineering surveys in Armenia in 2026 — without producing construction. Iran restated its opposition to any extraterritorial corridor, while its foreign minister later said the declaration addressed Tehran's core concerns; Russia, excluded from the format, objected to the Western role, and by 2026 had lost the last of its border-guard posts in Armenia while keeping its Gyumri base. Georgia moved the other way: its EU accession was assessed as de facto halted in 2024 and as at a standstill by the end of 2025, and in May 2026 Russia and the South Ossetian de facto authorities signed a treaty providing for a single economic space and Russian citizens in the entity's offices. The module's baseline treats the peace process as real but unfinished — text agreed and initialled, treaty unsigned, corridors unbuilt — and Georgia's two files as moving in opposite directions from each other. The autumn of 2026 added the TRIPP framework's Armenian legal gates — the Constitutional Court's clearance on 15 September, committee approval on 21 October and ratification by the National Assembly on 28 October, 63 votes to 32 — and a first jointly published inventory of what normalisation has produced, at Bishkek on 31 August; it added no signature, no alignment and no construction. In South Ossetia the May treaty was followed by personnel rather than instruments: an early election on 18 September returned a former Russian official as de facto president, and a Russian judicial official became de facto premier on 22 October.
The system's centre of gravity has moved from ceasefire lines to transit terms and legal instruments: who operates a road across Syunik matters now the way who held Shusha mattered in 2020. What the period shows is that the two halves of the region have decoupled — Armenia and Azerbaijan are negotiating an unfinished settlement, while Georgia's territorial file is being settled without negotiation, by paperwork signed in Moscow.
