The Russia-Shaped Hole

Every other region this section covers is somewhere you can point at. South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia — coastlines, borders, places. "Eurasia" is the odd one out: not a geography but a sphere of influence, the single heading named after an empire rather than a map. What it actually contains is the post-Soviet space (the Caucasus and Central Asia) held together by one organising fact, Russia, and defined now by Russia pulling out of it. If you want to watch a sphere of influence come apart in real time, watch the Caucasus. It runs the film first.

Western desks still price the region as a consolidating eastern bloc — Russia, Turkey, Iran and the Turkic world drawn together by a shared grievance with the West. The ledger says otherwise. Turkey and Russia have backed opposite sides in Syria, Libya and Karabakh while trading throughout: S-400s, TurkStream, the Akkuyu reactor. Turkey arms Azerbaijan and chairs the Organization of Turkic States, a lattice Ankara reads as a road east and Iran would prefer never to be built. Russia, until lately the region’s security guarantor, now watches its own treaty ally in Yerevan legislate a path to the EU. And Azerbaijan — nominally the pro-Russian corner of the old map — spent the past year quarrelling with Moscow in the open: over the airliner Russian air defence brought down near Grozny in December 2024, thirty-eight dead, a strike Putin admitted only last October, and over the June 2025 Yekaterinburg raids that killed two Azerbaijani brothers and had Baku arresting Russian state-media staff in reply. Then the twist that fits no bloc theory at all: even mid-quarrel, Putin reportedly warned Aliyev of a plot to unseat him and pull Baku back toward Moscow, the feuding patron tipping off the client — though Baku has never confirmed Moscow’s role, and the report originates with Azerbaijani media. These are not the beams of a bloc. They are the paperwork of neighbours who distrust one another and calculate, for now, that trading beats fighting.

Start with the borders, because someone drew them. The three Caucasus republics — Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia — had about two years of real independence after 1918, when the Russian Empire fell, before the Red Army swallowed them back: Baku in April 1920, Yerevan and Tbilisi by 1921. What sovereignty they had held before that was the limited kind, subjects of an empire that had annexed the region khanate by khanate a century earlier. Then Bolshevik commissars sat down and cut the map. Stalin, in the room as commissar for nationalities, backed the Caucasus Bureau 1921 decision to keep the Armenian-majority highland of Karabakh inside Soviet Azerbaijan — an administrative line drawn inside one country that, seventy years on, became a border two countries would fight over twice. 

In February 1988 the enclave voted to join Armenia; the referee was dissolving; and the pogroms and expulsions ran both ways — Sumgait and Baku emptied of Armenians, and Khojaly saw a massacre of Azerbaijanis. Moscow was never the neutral party it played, since during what became known as Black January in 1990 Soviet tanks rolled into Baku and killed well over a hundred civilians. By the 1994 ceasefire Armenia held Karabakh and seven districts around it, several hundred thousand Azerbaijanis had been driven out of them, and several hundred thousand Armenians had already been driven out of Azerbaijan proper.

Azerbaijan took the ground back by force, twice. The forty-four days of autumn 2020 were, among other things, the first war the wider world watched drones win. Turkish Bayraktars and Israeli loitering munitions took apart Armenian armour, artillery and air defence — including S-300 batteries built to shoot down aircraft, not cheap machines that cost less than the missiles fired at them — and militaries from Washington to Delhi rewrote doctrine around the footage. The November 2020 ceasefire put Russian peacekeepers on the ground and Russia’s FSB over the corridor across southern Armenia. A one-day operation in September 2023 finished it, and roughly 100,000 Karabakh Armenians left along the Lachin road within days. The peacekeepers stood aside, then went home a year and a half early, thanked politely by both capitals.

What is being built on top of the war is stranger than the war. In August 2025 the same corridor Moscow’s ceasefire had handed to the FSB was rebrokered in Washington and named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity — a hegemon re-entering a theatre it had ignored for a decade and repricing it in an afternoon. The broker is the geopolitically loaded part. The United States carries one of the world’s most organised Armenian lobbies, once strong enough to write Azerbaijan out of American aid through Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act; France, home to the other great diaspora, spent 2023–24 making itself Yerevan’s arms patron. These, however, were overtaken by facts on the ground: the 2020 war ended in forty-four days, faster than diaspora politics can turn a Western capital, and by 2025 it was an American president handing Baku its corridor. On 7 June 2026 Armenia ratified the turn from its own side — Pashinyan, the man who lost the war and then campaigned on peace with the victor, returned to office with 49.8% of the vote. Returned, but narrowed: he fell short of the two-thirds he would need to rewrite the constitution Baku wants changed as the price of a final treaty. A mandate for peace, in other words, that stops just short of being able to deliver the last thing peace requires.

That is what “Eurasia” hides: not a rising bloc but a sphere of influence coming apart at the seams, with the Caucasus as the place the seams show first. A section named after a vanished empire quietly assumes the empire is still the organising fact. In the Caucasus, for the first time in two centuries, it is not — Moscow has become a supporting actor in theatres it used to direct, and the states it used to command are shopping their security elsewhere while the old guarantor is spent in Ukraine. The same process runs further behind but unmistakable across the Caspian: the Turkic states are drawing together through the Organization of Turkic States — the road east Ankara reads into that lattice — while Kazakhstan hedges toward Beijing and Ankara for the weight Moscow no longer reliably carries. (Disclosure: the writer is Azerbaijani; weigh the vantage, asset and bias both.)