When the Soviet Union broke up, and the SSRs became independent nations, Christian Armenians and Islamic Azerbaijanis were not neatly divided into two homogeneous, contiguous regions.
A boundary between the two nations was established, leaving a large pocket of ethnic Armenians, in a region called Nagorno-Karabakh, trapped inside Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan claims to own the region but has had no effective control over it, making it a flashpoint much like Taiwan is for China.
Now various sources report fighting has again broken out between the two former Soviet SSRs - Armenia and Azerbaijan - long-time adversaries. It’s said to be more serious this time with hundreds of casualties.
Both historically and currently, for sectarian reasons Turkey has backed the Azerbaijanis and Russia has supported the Armenians. Currently the two larger nations are also supporting opposing sides in both Syria and Libya. In other words, they are in conflict, some of which is violent, but not precisely at war.
Their conflict has interesting implications for NATO. Turkey is a member of NATO, but the relationship is uneasy while Russia is NATO’s historic nemesis. However, in this conflict, NATO would be more likely to back Armenia and not Azerbaijan. Doing so could cause NATO to rupture, with Turkey leaving, something it might wish to do anyway.
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Communist collectivities like Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union managed to suppress historic ethnic enmities which flared up once the suppressive force was gone. We’ve seen this in Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Northern Macedonia, Georgia, Transnistria, eastern Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh.
One of these vest-pocket rebellions could trigger a much wider war. So far, we’ve been lucky.
The internal peace-keeping effectiveness of communism’s secret police and gulag wasn’t appreciated in the West during its heyday. This was probably because (a) communists kept trying to evangelize or take over non-member states and (b) they used brutal methods internally of which we don’t approve.
Communist China is currently using these methods in Xinjiang, upon the Islamic Turkic minority Uighurs there.
