Conflict and Peace

NATO's new Secretary General Mark Rutte visited Kyiv on Thursday (3 October). It is Rutte's first working trip since officially taking office earlier this week. Earlier, Rutte announced that Ukraine's NATO membership would be one of the spearheads of his policy.

The Israeli army has begun 'limited, localised and targeted attacks' on Hezbollah targets in the border area of southern Lebanon, the army announced in a statement overnight Monday to Tuesday. Soldiers on the ground will be supported by the Israeli Air Force.

The Armenian government plans to increase military spending by about 20 per cent, equivalent to 110 billion drams (about $286 million). According to the proposed state budget for 2025, the Ministry of Defence will receive 664.6 billion drams (about $1.7 billion). Military expert Leonid Nersisyan, a researcher at the Armenian analytical centre APRI, describes this defence spending as unprecedented. However, he points out that despite the increased budget, Yerevan still lags far behind Baku in terms of military spending. Military spending remains lower than social spending in the state budget. Although the gap in military spending between Armenia and Azerbaijan is narrowing, with Armenia now trailing by a factor of two instead of five or six as it did in 2013, the difference remains significant.

The United States has announced a $20 million aid package to strengthen Armenia's cyber, border and energy security, USAID Administrator Samantha Power announced at a Democracy Delivers Initiative event in New York. The event, co-hosted by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was attended by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah fired a rocket at the Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Wednesday morning (25 September) for the first time since the Gaza war broke out almost a year ago. It is also Hezbollah's deepest strike inside Israel. The militant movement's target was the headquarters of Mossad, Israel's secret service. The missile was intercepted by Israel.

The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, two republics in the South Caucasus, has never been solely about their bilateral relations. Regional and distant powers have long sought to influence the conflict, pursuing their own strategic interests. This dynamic persisted even after the Second Karabakh War (27 September – 10 November 2020), which ended the core dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan by bringing an end to the occupation of Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region. As the fourth anniversary of the war’s onset – also known as the 44-Day War – approaches, Baku and Yerevan continue to struggle with the peace process. Meanwhile, the most significant post-war initiative, the reopening of regional transportation and communication links, is facing increasing complications. Today, the often destructive involvement of external powers has become a major obstacle to the normalisation of Armenia-Azerbaijan relations and the implementation of regional transport projects.

A major Russian air strike on Lviv, a city in western Ukraine near the border with NATO member Poland, killed seven people, wounded more than 30 and caused extensive damage to historic buildings in the city centre, regional officials said on Wednesday (4 September). The attack came a day after Russia's deadliest single attack this year, when two ballistic missiles hit a military institute in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava, killing 50 people and injuring hundreds more. Meanwhile, neighbouring Poland scrambled jets to secure its airspace for the third time in eight days.

Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan have gone through a series of ups and downs that often resemble a rollercoaster. Periods of heightened optimism have been followed by abrupt breaks in talks, as seen in late 2022 and 2023. After Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a joint statement in December 2023, early 2024 brought renewed hope to the process. In March-April 2024, Yerevan accepted Azerbaijani demands concerning four villages along the northern part of their shared border. Azerbaijan announced its intention to make the COP29 United Nations Climate Summit in Azerbaijan in November 2024 a “COP of peace,” fostering a growing belief that an agreement might be reached by that date. However, the new or reinforced sine qua non-preconditions by President Aliyev—such as amendments to the Armenian constitution and the dissolution of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group established to seek a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict—have significantly dampened expectations that even a framework agreement outlining basic principles could be signed by the end of 2024.