Podcast: "Russians' appetites and interests have completely changed"
Gabriel Gavin on how a 35-year war ended in 24 hours
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To gauge Russia’s geopolitical standing as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, look no further than the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Georgians are entering a seventh week of street protests against their government’s switch from Brussels to Moscow while Armenians – stung by their Russian protectors’ unwillingness to defend them against Azerbaijan – propose EU membership.
The best litmus test, however, of an autocratic superpower’s authority is whether autocrats down the food chain fear it. Not anymore, it seems. Turkey’s support for evicting Russian forces from Syria suggests there’s a new sheriff in the region while Baku’s dogged pursuit of compensation for Russia’s downing of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane would never have happened before 2022.
“What we've seen as a result of the war in Ukraine is a massive realignment in terms of what Russia needs,” says Gabriel Gavin. In Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh published today, Gavin chronicles how a decades-long hot-and-cold war between Azerbaijanis and Armenians over a 4,400-square-kilometre statelet ended within 24 hours in September 2023 due largely to haemorrhaging Russian power. “After spending years in these costly conflicts - whether it's Armenia, Azerbaijan, whether it's Syria or Transnistria in Moldova, the Russians' appetites and interests have completely changed,” he told me on a New Books Network podcast. “What the Azerbaijanis did very well was understand that and play them … [They] realised long before the Armenians that the Russians were a paper tiger”.
A mixture of history and on-the-ground reporting, Ashes of Our Fathers tells the tragic story of Armenia and its diaspora, how Nagorno-Karabakh assumed such life-or-death importance for Armenians and Azerbaijanis alike, how this corroded their politics, and how Azerbaijan outspent and outwitted Yerevan and Moscow.
Now a staff reporter in Brussels with Politico, Gavin started out as “a grubby, inexperienced freelancer” in eastern European capitals before going on assignment to Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi and never coming back. “I really wanted to stay because I felt like the conflict was exploding and I felt like it was exploding as a consequence of Russia's diminishing global influence”.
"One of the great tragedies of the Karabakh conflict overall is that it's never really spoken about, even in families ... You meet people who watched their comrades burned alive or buried in a ditch and there's never really much social acknowledgement on either side of the scale of these sacrifices. People just move straight on so the amount of under-reported trauma there is astonishing. War reporting doesn't have to be, you know, in a flak jacket in the bunker ... and I think most often it's best when it's not. The war reporting that I really admire is far more sensitive and focuses not on bombs, shells and missiles but on the stories of the people who find themselves for one reason or another in harm's way".
For my Writers' Writers tip sheet, he chose High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland by Tom Parfitt (Headline, 2023) and Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020 — translated by Elisabeth Jaquette).