On Monday we wrote about the conundrum facing Moscow and Tehran in the Caucasus, namely how to respond to Azerbaijan and Armenia which are no longer operating from a point of rational national interest.
As of yet, they haven’t taken firm action and have allowed the problem to fester. Armenia’s June elections loom large. US Vice President JD Vance just endorsed current Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, but barring an opposition victory that then puts an end to the Trump Route of International Peace and Prosperity [TRIPP] business of a Turkish-led march of Western NATO influence into the Caucasus and Central Asia, Moscow and Tehran are going to have to take action at some point.
Russia could crush both Armenia and Azerbaijan economically if it so chooses, but it remains to be seen if that would be enough to alter the current course of events. The current ruling elites in both Armenia and Azerbaijan have already done a lot of work manufacturing opposition to Russia, and economic retaliation by Moscow might only play into that narrative. While the wider population would suffer, it appears as though the elites are being well-compensated by the West to steer their countries down this destructive path.
In the meantime, Baku and Yerevan—and Ankara lurking in the shadows—are approaching some inflection points. Construction is set to begin soon on a railway line, a natural gas pipeline, and a power line, connecting Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave across Armenian territory. Ali Akbar Velayati, senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is on record saying that Tehran will turn the project into a “graveyard for Trump’s mercenaries.” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders have backed up that threat. President Masoud Pezeshkian, on the other hand, strikes an upbeat tone, pointing to Pashinyan’s promises that the corridor will remain under Armenian control. That’s a promise he won’t have control over. While Armenian officials will remain physically present at all border and customs checkpoints, Washington and Yerevan already have a deal for the US to hold a 74 percent stake in corridor infrastructure for fifty years. The Americans will be setting up a private company to field investments and implement the project with Türkiye and Azerbaijani expected to have a heavy presence. So who’s going to have real control? Yerevan or the US-backed investors pouring billions into transportation and energy infrastructure?
Another critical point will come should Azerbaijan try to extend the TRIPP energy and trade corridors across the Caspian Sea and as Vance and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev discussed last week.
The strategic partnership agreement between the two sides frequently mentions the aim of connecting TRIPP to the Middle Corridor across the Caspian and sucking out critical minerals and energy resources from Central Asia. And Baku and Washington intend to enhance their security cooperation to help make it happen.
One need only to look at a map to see there are only a few ways for such a route to proceed. Resurrect the idea of a Trans-Caspian Pipeline and/or tanker fleets crossing the sea from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan or with the involvement of Russia and/or Iran.
The latter option isn’t one at all, according to Aliyev who was at Davos touting his country as the only safe transit route between Europe and Central Asia that is not exposed to sanctions risks and that there are plans to expand the Alat International Sea Trade Port, which handles Caspian cargo. (Oddly enough, China is a major investor in that expansion as Washington and Beijing’s Middle Corridor pursuits partially overlap [more on that below]).
Then Aliyev popped up at “Davos With Guns” promising more of the same. This is all an obvious threat to Russia and Iran as the expectation is that NATO and more governments unfriendly to Moscow and Tehran will follow the economic hits of being excluded from the Central Asia-Caucasus-Europe logistics. At that point Iran would be almost completely encircled and Russia would have hostile nations stretching from Finland to China—save Belarus and, for now, Georgia.
Marat Khairullin, a Russian military correspondent, blogger and documentary filmmaker, claims Azerbaijan’s actions will lead to major problems in Central Asia:
At one time, the Caspian states agreed not to let outsiders into the region – to develop the territory only with their own forces, together. And now we see how Azerbaijan is violating this collective promise as well – it let in both Türkiye and Israel. American and British proxies. And opened the way to direct destabilization of all of Central Asia.
Yet there are reasons that this vision to see energy and resources flow westwards from Central Asia across the Caspian through US/NATO-aligned states, thereby cutting out Iran and Russia, hasn’t happened yet. As we wrote back in November:
Supporters of the Trans-Caspian route envision it linking up with a new pipeline through TRIPP or the existing Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that runs from Azerbaijan to Türkiye via Georgia and then onto Europe.There are reasons why the pipeline hasn’t been built, chief among them that the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea signed between Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan didn’t solve disputes over submarine cables and pipelines.
Those are governed by the 2003 Tehran Convention, which stipulates environmental standards. Moscow and Tehran repeatedly invoke the Convention to effectively block the construction of pipelines between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
A tanker fleet could be a different story (although it could face challenges posed by climate change shrinking the sea, including already 50 kilometers off the coast of Kazakhstan).
Sure, it wouldn’t make economic sense, but then again it would mirror Europe’s energy strategy for the past four years.[1] And it would cut out Russia and Iran and serve as a ”Western connection” into Central Asia.
Notably, the heads of state at last year’s C5+1 (the five Central Asian states plus the US) endorsed the development of the Trans-Caspian Trade Route.
Military logistics will be soon to follow. Kazakhstan is now building NATO-standard shell factories and last year signed a military cooperation plan with Türkiye.
In Turkmenistan, a France-based opposition figure is helping to keep the pressure on the government in Ashgabat. There are rumors of an increased American presence in the country:
🚨⚡️ Urgent and serious
Some reports claim that the United States has transferred Delta Force units to Turkmenistan, in an area near Iran’s northeastern border.
-: Delta Force is the elite unit that carried out the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro! pic.twitter.com/jJXQKHx22B
— TURPO’🌍 (@AliNor383073191) February 7, 2026
They look to be nothing more than rumors, but the two countries do enjoy secretive military ties. And so across the board in the Caucasus and into Central Asia, Washington is working to essentially dare Moscow and Tehran to do something about it. Can they afford to be patient?
The Middle Corridor still isn’t all that economically competitive due to its mixture of road, rail, and sea links. It currently costs between $3,500–4,500 per 40-foot equivalent unit, compared with $2,800–3,200 via the northern route through Russia and Belarus.
And the US—and EU— continue attempts to gain economic ground in Central Asia. Last year, Brussels announced plans to invest 12 billion euros in Middle Corridor infrastructure. Business leaders and government officials from Central Asia and the United States gathered in Kyrgyzstan’s capital recently for the second B5+1 Business Forum as Washington tries to engineer a critical minerals-focused push into the region. They have a long way to go. From 1994 to 2024, the United States invested $44-51 billion in Central Asia, much of it made up of ExxonMobil and Chevron operations in Kazakhstan and their status as the largest shareholders in the Caspian Pipeline Consortium.
China, on the other hand, is only increasing its dominance there. Even with money coming in from the Gulf, China dwarfs all other players. Its investment in Central Asia hit $25 billion in the first half of 2025 alone.
And Russia is the second largest investor in the region, playing a major role in energy, mining, nuclear and other infrastructure.
With China and Russia in dominant economic positions in Central Asia, one would imagine they could keep the C5 in line, yet the US-led “West” does have an uncanny ability to get governments to ignore such details and act in nation-harming ways. One need only look at Armenia and Azerbaijan.
And another growing player in Central Asia are the Gulf states. From 2020-2024, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar invested a combined $16.2 billion. Along with infrastructure and energy projects, Turkish influence and Gulf monarchy money can also lead to other “projects”—namely what Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi calls “CIA Islam”. And we have seen a growing terrorism threat targeting Chinese infrastructure projects across the region. Just saying!
Notes
[1] Western majors like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell already play major roles in Kazakh oil; the problem apparently is that more than 80 percent of it moves through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which delivers crude via pipeline through Russia to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. The pipeline has continued operating through three years of war and it by all accounts a good deal for all involved.
But Nurul Rakhimbekov, the Founder and President of the DC-based think tank Center for Global Civic and Political Strategies, writes that it’s not safe. As evidence, he cites the fact that in February and October of 2025, drone strikes on the pipeline infrastructure threatened supplies.
Who was behind the strikes? NATO-backed Ukraine, of course.
10 comments
Comments are closed.
Starting to smell a lot like western overreach in an area they can’t easily reach, except going a bridge too far when you’re on the back foot risks catastrophic, unrecoverable loss of face.
As long as USD flow into the pockets of corrupt foreign politicians, they will make decisions contrary to the interests of their people. But bribes don’t change the facts of geography, physics, and economics, and the facts will ultimately prevail.
A few obstacles to NATO encroachment into Central Asia. Geographic proximity of China and Russia, making them the natural trading partners. Europe and US are mired in debt and have little government-backed or private money to sink into these projects, while, largely thanks to Western sanctions, Russia and China have both government and private investors willing and able to pour money into the region.
Turkey, ironically, is another major obstacle. Erdogan has lofty ambitions of extending his influence over the ex-Ottoman and other Islamic regions, but Turkey’s economy is in poor shape and is already straining to fund the Syrian adventure. So promises of pipelines and new transport corridors are at odds with Turkey’s ability to fund and deliver these things.
Ultimately, I think, money will talk and walk. Azeris and Armenians are going along with this because there is a promise of financial reward at the end, but that will fizzle out in a few years and leave them saddled with debts from funding economically non-viable projects. Smart money is on China expanding its influence in Central Asia and Russia regaining its influence in the Caucasus once the war in Ukraine is over.
Somebody in those countries must be getting their bags, or pallets, of cash up front. Or they are remarkably stupid. Not that the two are mutually exclusive. Otherwise, why would anybody trust the US to come through in its promises given the recent history of agreement incapability?
It may well be that Russia and Iran will take a page from the western playbook and finance, arm, train & equip local factions to create havoc in this region. Perfect deniability of course.
or perhaps in the US and europe.
normally, I do not subscribe to the “great man of history” theory – but I wonder with Azerbaijan. He has a very powerful neighbor, opposed to his policy, accused of killing Navalny with Tree Frog poison.* Perhaps Russia might follow the US precedent with Maduro.
*snark – it would have been so much easier and less controversial and efficient to epstein navalny.
It would have been much easier to let him linger in obsolescence – he was never a threat to anybody politically (his support maxed out at 2-3%, mostly people under 30 living in Moscow or St. Petersburg and reading Western media). His political shenanigans only benefited the communists, as they were – and are – the biggest opposition party.
His anti-corruption organization is said to have been a front end for a legal hit-man service to get rid of a competing oligarch – they got a drop of compromat and started a public campaign to “get rid of this corruption”. And somehow made enough money to allow his kids go to expensive western universities and his wife to have a high-quality live abroad.
As I recall, majority of Russians had not really heard about him until that “poisoning episode” during the Omsk flight. And what made him known then was not as much the poisoning, but the fact that he was flown out of the country during the corona lock up, when the borders of Russia were totally closed (not to mention the suspended sentence, which alone should have prevented him from leaving). For many that implied the man had some seriously influential protectors.
As did his behavior in the trial that followed. Attacking the judge, the prosecutor and a war veteran for no reason indicates that he either did not believe there would be a trial or that it would be just a formality, and he went off the rails when he realized it was a serious business.
Not made from actual tree frogs (we were told in the body of the article below the fold) but synthesised. The headline obviously invited readers to imagine masked Russian agents prowling through the rainforests of Ecuador, frog-catching nets in one hand and glass vials emblazoned with skull-and-crossbones in the other.
Conor
You wrote that Russia will face hostile nations on its border from Finland to China.
And yesterday’s very good piece about nuclear weapons treated the US, Russia and China as three equally hostile powers.
Has something changed to cool the unprecedented warm relations between Russia and China (currently having sea manoeuvres with Iran)?
If so, I didn’t get that memo.