The 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno- Karabakh is an outlier to the story told in this book. Vladimir Putin was neither the engineer nor instigator of war. Russia was not even a party. The 44-day war that erupted in late September was caused by a long-standing dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over who should govern Nagorno-Karabakh and the seven Azerbaijani districts occupied by Armenians since 1992. The war's wider, imperial, dimension was secondary to this primary, local, dimension. Yet that imperial dimension is an important part of our story.

Russia used the rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan to cement and attempt to extend its influence in the southern Caucuses. Although sentimentally predisposed towards Armenia, Russia attempted to maintain equidistance between the two rivals. This required a delicate balance since the geopolitical sands shifted significantly over time. Dependence on Russian security guarantees made Armenia a willing and loyal member of Russia's sphere of privileged interest, of the CIS, CSTO and Eurasian Union. Resource-rich Azerbaijan, meanwhile, wriggled free from Russia's orbit but not in a westward direction. Resource wealth and strategic location afforded Azerbaijan freedom to manoeuvre itself. Moscow needed Azerbaijan as much as Azerbaijan needed Moscow, forcing the Kremlin to deal with Baku on more equal terms. But Azerbaijan's increasingly authoritarian government had little inclination to embrace the West as anything more than a trade and investment partner. Autocracy thus placed normative distance between Azerbaijan and the West. To maintain influence amidst these changing conditions, Russian policy adapted to circumstance, sometimes at the cost of contradiction. It offered itself as peace mediator and seems genuinely to have pursued a settlement that could have resolved the conflict and established more stable conditions for the exercise of influence. Simultaneously, however, it sold weapons to both sides – an unusual stance for a mediator.

Amidst the delicate shifts and contradictions of policy, was one striking continuity. Among the Kremlin's enduring ambitions was the establishment of a Russian military presence inside Azerbaijan. Russia had just such a presence in Armenia. Fearful of both Azerbaijan and Turkey – memories of the 1915 genocide of more than a million Armenians during the death-throes of the Ottoman Empire understandably loomed large in the new Armenian state's political imagination – independent Armenia looked to Russia for security from the first.