What Obama and Trump Aimed to Do to Resolve the Artsakh Conflict: Former US Ambassador in Georgia Elaborates

In the Artsakh issue, Russia took advantage while the West was asleep. This is stated by former US Ambassador in Georgia Ian Kelly in the pages of the American magazine The Atlantic. He revealed certain moments from the negotiations on Artsakh in the 2010s.

“Both Obama and Trump did not want to engage in dizzying agreements that were necessary to reach an accord (between Armenia and Azerbaijan). Each of them apparently believed that the US president should only be involved in the final signing ceremony. However, one of the three co-chairs was ready to negotiate. Over the past decade, Putin has welcomed the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia almost every year. Thus, when the war began in 2020, only Putin was willing to do whatever it took to halt the fighting.

Paris and Washington, in fact, left the resolution of the conflict to Moscow and could only express relief at the end of hostilities and the arrival of Russian peacekeepers, even though Putin had forced them out of that process. Moscow is also promoting a new multilateral mechanism called '3+3' for the region. Aside from the grim prospects of NATO and EU membership, the West did not offer a significant alternative to the '3+3' framework. Unable to propose realistic alternatives to Russian-oriented economic and security mechanisms, the West left another region at the mercy of a predatory power and helped create another zone of instability,” he wrote.