Let us not mince words. The Armenian government, perched precariously between a resurgent Russian bear and a Western embrace that is more symbolic than substantive, has just received a Kremlin ultimatum. The details are murky, as these things always are, but the message is clear: choose Moscow or face the consequences.
Meanwhile, Britain, in a fit of geopolitical nostalgia, is fast-tracking defence ties with Tbilisi. One can almost hear the distant drums of 1914, when alliance systems and ultimatums cascaded into catastrophe. We are witnessing the return of great power politics in its purest, most dangerous form: the chessboard of small nations sacrificed for the ambitions of larger ones.
The Armenian government, which had dared to flirt with Western values, now finds itself cornered. The West, for all its talk, offers little more than moral support and a few extra battalions of rhetoric. But rhetoric does not stop tanks.
And Russia, as we have seen in Ukraine, is not shy about using them. The British defence pact with Georgia is a welcome gesture, but it smacks of imperial nostalgia, a faint echo of the days when Whitehall could reshape the Caucasus with a stroke of a pen. Today, the pen is weak; the sword, however, remains sharp in Moscow’s hand.
We are sleepwalking into a new confrontation, and the Armenians, like the Czechs before them, may be the ones to pay the price. The real question is not whether Armenia can survive this ultimatum, but whether the West has the stomach for a conflict that would make the Ukraine war look like a border skirmish. I suspect the answer is no.
And that, dear readers, is why we should be very, very worried.
