Azerbaijan Risks Placing Itself On A Ukrainian-Like Collision Course With Russia

Azerbaijan’s shadow membership in NATO through its conformation with the bloc’s standards and alliance with Turkiye has now expanded into a de facto alliance with Ukraine that naturally spikes Russia’s threat assessment of Azerbaijan.

Russia and Azerbaijan reached an agreement in mid-April for resolving their dispute over December 2024’s Azerbaijan Airlines incident where Russian forces accidentally damaged one of its planes flying over Chechnya while responding to a Ukrainian drone attack. Putin apologized to Ilham Aliyev for what happened during their meeting in Dushanbe last fall, which paved the way for this deal that Federation Council Speaker Valentine Matviyenko celebrated as “open[ing] up new opportunities” for bilateral ties.

For as well intentioned as her prediction was, it was derailed by Aliyev hosting Zelensky less than a fortnight after, during which time they signed six deals on defense co-production. To add insult to injury, the meeting take place in Gabala near the Russian border, which is also where Russia used to operate a radar station till 2012. The message being sent is that Aliyev hasn’t forgotten Russia’s strikes on the storage facilities and other infrastructure owned by his national energy company in Ukraine last summer.

Instead of moving past last year’s tensions, which were sparked by the aforesaid airline incident but greatly exacerbated by Azerbaijan raiding Sputnik Baku on espionage-related pretexts and then agreeing to the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP), Aliyev is worsening them. It was already bad enough that he agreed to TRIPP, whose dual purpose is as a NATO military logistics corridor into Central Asia, and his armed forces completed their conformation to NATO standards last November.

To make matters even worse, he now just agreed to co-produce arms with Ukraine, thus making Azerbaijan an official co-belligerent against Russia. Given the precedent established by other co-belligerents, which eventually expanded their arms transfers/sales to include other forms of cooperation that were then institutionalized through security guarantees, Azerbaijan will likely end up doing the same. That would then risk placing Azerbaijan on a Ukrainian-like collision course with Russia.

Despite not being a formal member of NATO, Turkiye – which fields NATO’s second-largest army – is its mutual defense ally, thus meaning that any Russian-Azeri conflict could spiral into a Russian-NATO one. Even if direct hostilities between them are averted as has thus far been the case over Ukraine, Azerbaijan could still become the “second Ukraine” in the sense of turning into another proxy war battlefield. TRIPP would then shed its commercial cover to openly become NATO’s military logistics corridor to Azerbaijan.

There are three plausible conflict scenarios: 1) Drones (be they Azeri or Ukrainian) attack Russia from Azerbaijan (whether during this special operation or “Round 2”) and Russia retaliates; 2) Azerbaijan intervenes in Kazakhstan’s support with Turkish-NATO-Ukrainian backing if Russia launches a special operation there to sever its ties with NATO (it already plans to produce the bloc’s shells); and 3) Russia launches a special operation against Azerbaijan to stop Turkiye’s “Trans-Caspian Pipeline” plans.

Regardless of whatever happens, one thing is certain, and it’s that Azerbaijan’s shadow membership in NATO through its conformation with the bloc’s standards and alliance with Turkiye has now expanded into a de facto alliance with Ukraine, which spikes Russia’s threat assessment of Azerbaijan. Its new role as NATO’s irreplaceable transit state for facilitating the bloc’s expansion of influence into Central Asia through TRIPP already carried with it a huge risk of conflict with Russia that just got much, much worse.