Last August’s announcement of the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) caught Russia completely by surprise. Prior to this megaproject’s unveiling, Russia assumed that Armenia and Azerbaijan would abide by the last point of the Moscow-mediated November 2020 ceasefire for opening a regional connectivity corridor that would be protected by the FSB. Instead, they replaced Russia’s role with the US, and this route now has the dual function of a NATO military logistics corridor to Central Asia.
The UK swiftly lifted its arms embargo on Armenia and Azerbaijan prior to separately strengthening military ties with the latter. In between these two moves, Azerbaijan announced that its armed forces completed their years-long effort to conform to NATO standards. Kazakhstan also clinched a critical minerals deal with the US before announcing that it’ll begin producing NATO-standard shells. Vance then visited Armenia and Azerbaijan in February. All of this amounts to NATO’s encirclement of Russia.
It wasn’t till recently that Russia overcame this military-strategic shock. Prior to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s trip to Moscow in early April, which was assessed here as the moment of truth in their ties, the Russian Triad – the Presidential Administration, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia’s three premier policymaking institutions – was silent. After that fateful meeting, however, their representatives finally started warning about southern-emanating threats from NATO.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk told TASS right afterwards that TRIPP “upset the regional balance that had existed since 1828”. By late April, Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov informed the SCO that “We are closely monitoring the attempts of extra-regional states to ensure military presence and logistical missions in Central Asia.” By then, Azerbaijan had just entered into a de facto military alliance with Ukraine, which complements its close military ties with the US, Turkiye, and the UK.
Just this week, the final part of the Russian Triad chimed in on this subject after Director of the Third CIS Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry Alexander Sternik told TASS that “[EU countries] make no secret of their intention to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia in the West and are working with our partners [in Central Asia] toward roughly the same, slightly veiled, goals. They do this using vague terms such as ‘economic diversification’ and ‘protection against external threats.’”
Left unsaid but self-evident to all honest officials observing NATO’s TRIPP-driven encirclement of Russia is that Turkiye’s “Organization of Turkic States” (OTS), which is consolidating as a united military–security bloc, threatens to replace the CSTO for joint members Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The purpose is to “poach” those two like NATO and the EU are respectively in the process of “poaching” Armenia from the CSTO and the Eurasian Economic Union. That would be catastrophic for Russian security if it happens.
Azerbaijan’s location imbues it with an irreplaceable role in NATO’s TRIPP-driven and OTS-fronted encirclement of Russia. If this process isn’t soon halted and instead uncontrollably accelerates, then shadow NATO member Azerbaijan and nearby Kazakhstan, which the bloc wants to follow in its footsteps, could coordinate a three-front proxy war on Russia with Ukraine. The Russian Triad is finally aware of these threats, so the Kremlin might soon try to preemptively thwart them, but it’s unclear how.
