To BHMA International Edition talks with Alex Cooley, Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, and Joshua Kucera, Senior Analyst for the South Caucasus at the Crisis Group, about the emerging geopolitical order in the Black Sea, the key players, and what the region could look like once the war in Ukraine is at an end.
– Alex what do you see happening in Ukraine? And what are the possible scenarios for the day after the war? What kind of settlement, if any, could emerge?
Alex Cooley
I think it’s important to understand that this war has been going on for over four years. It’s a conflict of considerable duration, and the war has evolved through several different phases militarily.
What we need to grasp is essentially this: the war has reached a stalemate. Sure, we see incursions into different parts of Ukraine and different defensive efforts and counter attacks, but the picture on the ground is relatively stable. The main factor that has changed over the last year is the perception that, with the change in the U.S. administration, Washington would somehow be able to exert leverage over Ukraine to force a quick settlement. And this gave rise to talks about a peace process, about a conflict settlement, about security guarantees and so forth. But it hasn’t worked out that way for a number of different reasons.
The fundamental issue that is holding up negotiations now is who controls the Donbass region. Russia wants the Donbas to be handed over to Russia as part of the settlement, but Ukraine insists that this is tantamount to giving away their sovereignty. And from the Ukrainian perspective, it’s important to note that those parts of the Donbas that are not controlled by Russia are urban and semi-urban in nature. In other words, these are very difficult territories and terrains to fight on and to take. So it’s no surprise that Russia would want these as part of the settlement. For its part, Ukraine feels that it cannot possibly agree to this.
The other major development brough on by this administration is that Ukraine has now realized they are on their own, that they cannot actually rely on external patron powers. They are very grateful for EU support, both budgetary, more of which could be unlocked now that we have a new Hungarian government, and defense support from individual countries. But having to rely on, say, U.S. security guarantees or a tripwire coalition of the willing, is very much not their thinking now. They are at the cutting edge of drone technologies, and looking very carefully at the numbers they would need to assure their own security; in short, they are very much into the idea that they have to promote their own security needs.
So that’s where we are. Many people thought we would be closer to a settlement and a deal, but the final factor, the recent war in Iran, is also diverting the attention of the U.S., which was more engaged with these negotiations earlier in 2026.
– Joshua, we are now faced with two wars that need to come to an end, and we are also looking at the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Gulf, too. Are these regions strategically interconnected, and to what extent does one conflict influence developments in the others?
Joshua Kucera
The Ukraine war has had a pretty significant impact on the Caucasus, and in multiple ways. I think one major effect is that Russia, which has been the dominant power here for a very long time, has seen its position decline quite significantly. Distracted by Ukraine, it hasn’t been fulfilling its security obligations to Armenia, for example, to the degree the Armenians want.
After the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, there was a Russian-brokered settlement that included Russian peacekeepers. Having Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh was seen for a time as a big regional win of sorts for Russia. Βut after 2022, you saw Azerbaijan slowly begin to push those peacekeepers out of the region. In the meantime, given how disillusioned it is with its security relationship with Russia, Armenia has also sought out other partners. And so I feel that Russia’s influence in the region has decreased quite a bit, and that has opened up the door for other partners—most notably Turkey, but also to differing degrees the EU and the U.S.—to come here. Still, the situation is very fluid now, very dynamic, and it’s hard to know where it’s going to end up.
Τhe nightmare scenario for people here is that the Iranian state will collapse in the same way Syria did, for example. That created huge refugee flows, which isn’t something Azerbaijan and Armenia are prepared to deal with. And I think that would pose a big risk, especially for Azerbaijan, given that quite a large percentage of the Iranian population is ethnic Azerbaijani, and the relationship between the Azerbaijan government and the Iranian Azerbaijanis is somewhat ambiguous.
-Are we witnessing the emergence of a new order in the Black Sea, one shaped by the competing interests of the EU, Turkey, Russia, and potentially China?
Alex Cooley
I think that, for a long time, views on the geopolitics of the Black Sea were framed very much in terms of classic post-Cold War paradigms. Essentially, we had an expanding West with its transatlantic security and political institutions, the EU and NATO, confronting an increasingly revisionist bloc led by Russia. So there was the Western sphere and there was the Russian sphere, and then we had the quote-unquote “borderland countries”, including those of the South Caucasus that Josh mentioned. And geopolitics was viewed as a kind of a tug-of-war between these poles.
Now, as a result of these different conflicts, I think, coupled with the change in U.S. government, we’re seeing a much more layered approach to Black Sea geopolitics and securities. An approach in which every country is positioning itself for autonomy and trying to figure out how to advance their own interests both formally and informally, institutionally and bilaterally.
Turkey’s a really great example of that. On the one hand, officially, they have been a strong supporter of Ukraine’s sovereignty, and they have been quite vocal about denouncing Russian aggression. On the other hand, they didn’t get on board with all the Western sanctions, and have actually welcomed a lot of re-flagging operations as well as the whole question of Turkish vessels being used as part of the shadow fleet.
All in all, I think there’s a complexity now to Black Sea politics and strategy that may not have been the case—or which we weren’t thinking about, perhaps—ten or fifteen years ago.
-What do you think pose the biggest risks of escalation or fragmentation in the region in the years to come?
Joshua Kucera
Personally, I’m concerned about the Caucasus. We have a peace process ongoing between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but while there is a draft agreement, it is still not a finalized peace deal. It’s a fragile situation, and even though there has been significant progress, it was very difficult to reach this point.
But now the instability in Iran has cast a shadow over the process, raising concerns about both potential spillover effects and the possibility that the United States may become distracted. Because the U.S. played an important role in advancing the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process to its current stage.
There is still work to be done, but as far as we know, the U.S. diplomats responsible for our peace deal are currently preoccupied with developments relating to Iran. So, while I don’t think the main risk is a return to war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—because, hopefully, we’re past that stage, we had expected to be looking more optimistically toward the future. Instead, there is now concern that progress may slow down more than we had hoped.
Can the European Union realistically become a stabilizing force in its region?
Joshua Kucera
My sense is that the EU’s vision of itself as a geopolitical actor is still in its very early stages; it’s not yet fully-formed. I can only really speak from my perspective on the Caucasus, but the EU was harboring various transit-linked ambitions— transcontinental transit, for example: what people call the Middle Corridor. The EU would like to be involved in that, but after working on it for a long time, the U.S. and Donald Trump came along and stole their thunder with his Trump Route.
They’re still trying to catch up, but my feeling is that they lack vision and the bandwidth to devote to the geopolitics of the South Caucasus.
That said, there are some one-off projects. There are energy projects, for instance, with the EU buying more gas from Azerbaijan. And there’s the big cable that’s going to carry electricity from Azerbaijan to Georgia, then cross the Black Sea into Romania and from there to Hungary. Energy is an EU strategic priority, but these projects are all a bit disconnected. They’re all linked to the idea of connectivity, but there’s little concerted effort here, I’d say. And while I can’t speak for other regions, I feel it’s the same in other parts of the world, too.
Alex Cooley
The EU has some principles in place. These include reducing Russian dominance, fostering the connectivity Josh was talking about, the economic sort of integration, promoting regional stability, and providing a kind of governance and economic framework to complement NATO on the security side. The problem is that most of the countries around the Black Sea and adjacent to it are not EU Member States, and the bloc’s agenda is complicated by these conflicts and the national interests of these different actors.
Of course, there are also sources of tension within the EU itself. In relation to the Caucasus, for example, the French are more supportive of Armenia, while other countries with energy interests are more supportive of Azerbaijan. So, while there are a set of principles the EU has formulated and would like to apply, strategies need you to know where you’re going and to be willing to make certain trade-offs. And I think there’s a fluidity to the current situation that makes it very difficult to press ahead with a highly coherent strategy.
Cooley and Kucera participated in a public discussion organized by ELIAMEP and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
