Armenia, Azerbaijan in Russia's Shadow

Last year I met with a Russian official at an international conference in Moscow. During our long and contentious discussion on the problem of settling the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, he argued that any attempt by Armenian leadership to try to change the status quo in a positive sense will result in events similar to those that took place in 1997 when former President Levon Ter-Petrosian was forced to resign, or in 1999, when several top local officials were shot dead by terrorists in the national parliament. I was not surprised to hear such a strongly held opinion from my Russian colleague, just as I was not surprised to learn of a new failure of the opposing parties to reach a breakthrough in the peace talks recently held in Kazan.