Turkey wages war in Nagorno Karabakh. What should Russia do?

The crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh poses a huge challenge for Russian diplomacy. A breakthrough is needed, otherwise it will be Turkey, not Russia, that will bring its erstwhile empire back to life. Turkey conducts military operation in Nagorno-Karabakh On Sunday, September 27, the active phase of hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh resumed. In the south of the unrecognized republic, the army of Azerbaijan launched an offensive using heavy equipment and artillery. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said at a meeting of the Security Council that Azerbaijan must resolve the conflict once and for all to restore historical justice. The President of Azerbaijan added that he would never allow a second so-called Armenian state on Azerbaijani land.As a result of the hostilities, the parties have suffered losses both in military hardware and manpower. According to the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, 31 people were killed on the line of contact from the Armenian side during the battles. Azerbaijan says that Armenia lost 550 people.Armenia has so far refused assistance from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), since Armenia does not recognise Nagorno-Karabakh as a sovereign state - it means that the war is not taking place on the territory of Armenia. However, the current aggravation is not just a matter of the positional advance of Azerbaijan to occupy a few dominant heights. The current crisis comes as part of the plan to bring Karabakh back under the control of Azerbaijan under the leadership of such a strong regional player as Turkey.According to political scientist Semyon Baghdasarov, the offensive is being conducted in coordination with Turkey as a "well planned operation.""Both Turkish special forces and militants of the Syrian so-called opposition are fighting on the side of Azerbaijan - they are, in fact, representatives of terrorist organizations from all over the world and from the East - 4,000 people. This is a pre-planned military operation," Semyon Bagdasarov told Pravda.Ru.According to him, Turkey's President Recep Erdogan is preparing for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Lausanne Agreement in 2023 and for the presidential election. Erdogan is active on all fronts at once: Cyprus, Greece, Libya, Iraq and South Caucasus. Russia's three most important objectives in the conflict In this regard, Moscow faces the first objective to show CSTO allies and observers that this organization actually exists and has power to defend others. This is very important, because security is the only factor that today keeps Armenia and the Central Asian states in Russia's sphere of influence and protects them from the destructive influence of the West.Objective No. 2 is to once again stop Turkey in its revanchist ideas of neo-Ottomanism and Pan-Turkism.Turkey, in contrast to Russia, which called on the warring parties to show restraint in connection with the crisis in Karabakh, clearly expressed its support for Azerbajian. Azerbaijan and Turkey are "one nation in two states," as Erdogan once noted. Erdogan calls himself Putin's "friend," but in fact he undermines "fraternal" relations with Russia.Ankara openly pushes Gazprom out of the Turkish gas market at a difficult time for the Russian economy. Russia currently ranks fifth on the list of gas suppliers to Turkey, while Azerbaijan ranks first with a 23.5 percent of the share of the Turkish market. Natural gas supplies via the Turkish Stream pipeline system actually stopped, while the Blue Stream never came out of repairs.Turkey has been reducing its purchases of Russian oil too lately in an effort to replace Russian oil with that from Azerbaijan. Turkey's largest refinery STAR, which belongs to SOCAR of Azerbaijan,  has not bought a barrel of Urals oil from Russia for two months already, although in the past it used to be one of the country's largest buyers of Russian oil.Russia's third objective is to prevent the triumph of one religion over another, which in this case is fraught with the strengthening of Islamic extremism in the region, which is critically dangerous for Russia. Erdogan once threatened to "blow up Russia" from the inside in its Islamic regions.All this does not come contrary to the fact that Azerbaijan has the right to return its territories, but not within the framework of the former Soviet autonomy, whose people made their choice in a referendum in 1991 - but within the framework of Azerbaijani regions that Armenia seized around the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region. One ha to return those territories, albeit with the recognition of the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. That would be fair.