NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reportedly praised on Monday Azerbaijan’s close military ties with NATO member Turkey which helped it to win the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“The close cooperation between the Azerbaijani army and the Turkish armed forces will greatly contribute to the deepening of [Azerbaijan’s] relations with NATO,” Azerbaijani media quoted him as saying during talks with Azerbaijan’s Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov.
Stoltenberg arrived in the Azerbaijani capital at the weekend on the first leg of his tour of the three South Caucasus states. He met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev before holding separate talks with Hasanov and Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov. Hasanov was reported to thank NATO for having “always supported Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity.”
The Turkish-Azerbaijani military cooperation has deepened significantly since 2020. Turkey provided decisive military assistance, including sophisticated weapons and personnel, to Azerbaijan during the six-week war in Karabakh. Armenia maintains that Ankara also sent thousands of Islamist mercenaries from Syria to fight in Karabakh on the Azerbaijani side. The Turkish and Azerbaijani governments deny that.
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Shortly after the outbreak of the hostilities, President Emmanuel Macron of France, another key NATO member state, also accused the Turks of recruiting “Syrian fighters from jihadist groups” for Azerbaijan. Macron urged the U.S.-led alliance to “face up to the behavior of a NATO member.”
Then Armenian President Armen President Armen Sarkissian brought up the matter with Stoltenberg when he visited in Brussels later in October 2020. The NATO chief refrained from criticizing Ankara and said that NATO is “not part of this conflict.”
Successive Armenian governments have sought to deepen ties with NATO while keeping Armenia allied to Russia politically and militarily. Armenian troops participated in the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, and dozens of them remain deployed in Kosovo as part of a multinational peacekeeping operation also led by the alliance.
Visiting Yerevan in January, Stoltenberg’s special representative for the South Caucasus and Central Asia, Javier Colomina, praised the current Armenian government for moving away from Moscow and “getting closer to us.” Colomina revealed that the two sides are now working on a new “individually tailored partnership program.” The Russian Foreign Ministry responded by warning that closer ties with NATO could only spell more trouble for the South Caucasus nation.
