Sergey Minasyan

• Doctor of Political Science
• Caucasus Institute

Over the last two decades, conventional (non-nuclear) deterrence in Russia's military strategy has changed from being a sub-tactical, sub-strategic warfighting tool to being a separate military-political factor—a self-contained component in Russia's strategic deterrence concept. Soon after Russia revised its military doctrine in 2014, it applied th...

For more than a quarter-century, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been one of the most important factors influencing the political map of the South Caucasus. On 12 May 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia, and Azerbaijan signed a cease-fire agreement that ended military operations in the conflict zone and has been observed until recently. Negotiations...

The volume presents the results of a study of formal and informal groups and mechanisms within Armenia's political, economic and military elites, aiming to reveal trends in formal institution-building and the changing role of informality in Armenia's power system since its independence from the USSR. The study relies on data from over 50 interviews...

Post-Soviet Georgia pays particular attention to its armed forces and defense and security policy as crucially important elements of its state-building. Its involvement in the armed ethnopolitical conflicts of the 1990s in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as the Five-Day War of August 2008 with Russia, awakened the political elite and the Georgi...

Introducing this special issue of Caucasus Survey on the unrecognized politics of de facto states in the post-Soviet space, this article discusses some of the key problems involved in the study of these entities. It relates the origins of the articles contained in this collection and briefly introduces the main themes they deal with: the definition...

Russia holds a special place in Armenian foreign and security policy, just as Armenia plays a unique role in Moscow's regional Caucasus strategy. This memo analyzes the current state of Russian-Armenian relations, paying special attention to the regional context that affects them. It also contrasts the simplistic perceptions of Russian-Armenian rel...

Emerging from a September 2013 meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan expressed his readiness to join the Russian-led Customs Union (CU) and disassociated Armenia from plans to initial an Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union. Yerevan had spent four years in successful negotiations wi...

Introduction The current situation around the Karabakh conflict leads to pessimism concerning the prospects for a speedy resolution based on mutual compromise. The latest meeting of Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents with the mediation of their Russian counterpart, held in Kazan on June 24, 2011, was a failure. The sides retain totally contrasting...

Armenia's foreign policy is unique among the foreign policies of the post-Soviet states because it tries to balance the interests of all the great powers through a process of complementarism. Although similar to multi-vectorism, Armenia's complementarism draws on several unique resources in pursuing its foreign policy, including its diaspora around...

This third CI Research Paper analyzes the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh from the standpoint of the concept and phenomenon of asymmetric conflict. The asymmetry of the conflict is rooted in the non-identical statuses of the principal parties to the confl ict, and in the military and security aspects of the confrontation in the Azerbaijan-Nagorno-Ka...

Since Armenia's independence in 1991, its three successive presidents have invariably expressed their country's readiness to normalize relations with Turkey without preconditions. This is despite unsettled historical issues between these two nations, namely the issue of the 1915 Genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey, and the disappointing record...