EU plans to tap into Azerbaijani gas to replace Russian might end soon

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Politico
10 Apr 2023 17:15

The Politico report says that any conflict in the South Caucasus region will have a negative impact on Europe's aspirations to soon replace Russia's fossil fuel.

Pump jacks pump oil at an oil field on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Baku, Azerbaijan, October 5, 2017 (Reuters)

The geopolitical near-crisis tensions in South Caucasus between oil and gas-rich Azerbaijan and Armenia could extend their damage to Europe and the EU's attempts to find alternatives to Russian fossil fuels.

The EU's approaches to try and maintain balanced relations in the area between the warring neighbors have been far from successful, according to a Politico report published on Monday.

The bloc sent a civilian mission to assist police on the Armenian side to relieve some border tensions, but Azerbaijan called it interference in its affairs and threatened to take retaliatory measures; the same response could be heard from Baku whenever the EU criticizes its human rights record.

Earlier, the EU and Azerbaijan reached a deal to double Europe's gas imports from Baku to 20 billion cubic meters by 2027, but the agreement is on rocky grounds.

A senior EU official, who asked to remain anonymous, told Politico that Europe was disappointed that its peace mission was not successful.

“We were hoping for a different scenario with Baku. We are sharing all relevant information on patrols and so on with Azerbaijan because we don’t want any issues.”

Europe has been hoping that while Russia is busy with the war in Ukraine, Brussels could establish a stronger presence in the South Caucasus region and develop economic and diplomatic ties with Azerbaijan, while providing Yerevan with political support to try and balance relations between the two.

But this was not how Baku perceived the EU's border-relief efforts.

During an address in March, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev slammed foreign interference in his country's confrontation with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

“The mediators involved in the Karabakh conflict [try] not to solve the issue but to freeze it,” he said, arguing that Baku rejected efforts to “tire us out with meaningless negotiations.”

Baku was able to take back swathes of Nagorno-Karabakh in a 2020 offensive - a region that was within Armenia's control but internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. The short war ended with a Russia-mediated ceasefire.

But now, there are fears that a full-out war might break between the two at any moment.

"Many Armenians believe there’ll be a spring offensive by Azerbaijan," Markus Ritter, director of the EU mission to South Cacauses, told the German newspaper, Deutsche Welle. "If this doesn't happen, our mission is already a success."

Last week, Baku's state media said that the European mission is helping "provoke Azerbaijan into a new war," and now the EU is "to bear the blame "in the event of a new conflict.

"Azerbaijan and Russia are basically saying the same thing — that the EU mission is a military-intelligence operation under the cover of monitoring," Ritter added. "They’ve been trying to discredit the mission, which is exclusively civilian and unarmed, from the beginning and there’s not much we can do about it."

The director of Azerbaijan’s mission to the EU, Vaqif Sadıqov, told Politico that the presence of the EU's mission near his country's borders had raised concerns in Baku.

"This is a bilateral issue between Armenia and the EU, but it is happening a few hundred meters from our own border posts and in a heavily militarized environment where we have Russian border guards, Armenian border guards, Russian regular units, Armenian regular units and, closer to the Iranian border, Iran’s military. Now we also have EU peacekeepers. So we have legitimate security questions," he told the newspaper, warning that Baku might assume that Brussels wants to increase its presence in the region rather than just brokering peace.

Human rights but also gas

Baku is furious after the European Parliament supported a March report that "condemns the latest large-scale military aggression by Azerbaijan in September."

The report also accused the Caucasian country of hindering the peace process and underlined "the EU’s readiness to be more actively involved in settling the region’s protracted conflicts."

The bloc's foreign affairs committee signed off on the report, arguing that Azerbaijan’s "respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms is still very negative and needs to be improved before the EU further deepens its political and energy partnership with the country." Among the improvements are the government's treatment of activists and the absence of an independent judiciary system, among others.

Azerbaijani's parliament responded to the European resolution, stating that their decision bore an "unbearable stench of corruption." It also accused MEPs of being biased toward "Armenia and the Armenian diaspora, long since a cancerous tumor of Europe."

"Concerns about human rights from the EU irritate officials in Baku,” said Ahmad Mammadli, head of the Azerbaijani opposition 1918 Movement. Mammadli called on Europe to sanction the country, arguing that "Western pressure on authoritarian states is always possible, as long as it is not exchanged for natural resources."

Sanctions or fossil fuel

President of the EU Council Charles Michel discussed last month with the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan the ground situation and stressed "the EU’s readiness to help advance … peace and stability in the region." But only hours later, Baku sent its troops to push further into the ceasefire zone in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Europe still hopes to be able to broker a solution between the two parties, according to Tom de Waal, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank.

"The EU is making approaches to both sides to try and restart the peace process. From the outside, it looks menacing, but when you speak to people on the inside there’s still hope that we haven’t run out of the road just yet," he said.

But if the initiative collapses, Waal warned of possible calls from Western countries to sanction Baku - a scenario which might exponentially increase the risk of the bloc's alternative source of Russia's fossil fuel.