After the Second Karabakh War (2020) and especially after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine (2022), France saw a number of new diplomatic opportunities opening up for it in the southern post-Soviet space as Russia's traditional influence waned.
Armenia
In November 2023, the BESA Post-Soviet Conflict Research Program published a series of texts, half of which focus on the recent surge of anti-Semitism in the region of interest, and the rest on the recent dynamics of military supplies in the South Caucasus, Russian-Georgian relations, and the electoral behavior of Kazakhstan's Russian-speaking minority.
BESA Post-Soviet Conflicts Research Digest No. 1 (September-October 2023)
The Hamas attack on Israel triggered a wave of antisemitism in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. The root causes of this surge are similar: anti-Israeli propaganda in Russia (which is anti-liberal and anti-Western in nature) and in the Islamic world (usually of a specifically religious nature), as well as in the West (typically taking on an extreme leftist nature).
The resulting IDF's Iron Swords Military Operation has caused, as usual, an outburst of anti-Semitism around the world. However, unlike previous military confrontations with terrorists, this time the world's anti-Semitic reaction to Israel's actions was not only much stronger, but also affected countries and regions that usually refrain from displaying violent anti-Israeli rhetoric and positions.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, when several thousands of heavily armed fighters from the radical Islamist terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip, invading Israeli border settlements and other communities in the south of the country, a significant number of samples of weapons and equipment used by the group's Iran-trained military wing fell into Israeli hands right then.
In the Russian media, the objective coverage of the efforts of the Israeli authorities and military to counter the aggression of Hamas is growing thin. At the same time, stories full of sympathy for the terrorists and condemnation of Israel are becoming increasingly common. Many Armenian media outlets, social media and NGOs are joining in.
The establishment of Azerbaijani control over the entire territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has given rise to a wave of anti-Semitism in Armenia. The following anti-Semitic elements can be identified in contemporary Armenian public discourse.
The current Azerbaijani military operation in Karabakh was framed in Baku as anti-terrorist, since it came as a reaction to a series of subversive actions, including the killing 19 September of 6 Azerbaijanis by Armenian separatist paramilitary units. As far as Armenia is concerned, the further developments might depend on how the current government in Yerevan plays its cards and whether it will survive in case of the defeat (as it looks like happen now) of the Karabakh separatists. A most intriguing, among other questions, is: whether it will deepen Yerevan’s dependence from Moscow? Or could it be Armenia's path towards independence from Russia?
The military escalation that took place in Karabakh in November 2020, has fundamentally transformed the (geo)political configuration in the region. After the fall of 2020, the territory of unrecognized “Artsakh” – “Nagorno-Karabakh republic”, established in 1991 on the part of the territory of mostly populated by ethnic Armenians Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan, shrank almost four times. Azerbaijan has regained internationally recognized control of its lands and its refugees, who were forced out by the Armenians started to return there. Authorities of Armenia, historically a patron of the unrecognized enclave, are now actively preparing for a peaceful solution. However, this solution will be now probably written not in Yerevan.