Someone benefits from Russia’s war
Over at Bloomberg, Marc Champion writes:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t play out the way Vladimir Putin hoped, but it’s proving an unimagined boon for his fellow authoritarian leader in neighboring Azerbaijan. President Ilham Aliyev has never been as politically secure as he is today. Aliyev has won big from Russia’s invasion on multiple fronts. In July last year he signed a deal with the European Union to double natural gas exports to the bloc, as it scrambled for new energy sources to fill the void left by Russian supplies lost to sanctions. New infrastructure has to be built to make that possible, but increased sales and prices together raised revenue from the ex-Soviet nation’s oil and gas sectors from $19.5 billion in 2021, to $35 billion in 2022. Those fossil fuels accounted for more than 92% of Azerbaijan’s exports and over half the state budget.
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A distracted Russia, the traditional security provider for Azerbaijan’s arch-rival Armenia, also gave Aliyev the space to overrun the ethnic-Armenian controlled enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, ending 30 years of war and humiliation with precisely the kind of short and glorious military victory Putin aimed to achieve in Ukraine. From this already high base, things are looking up for Aliyev. Azerbaijan just locked up the right to hold the next global summit on climate change, COP-29.
