The question has to be asked whether the British Empire is also a third party, along with Turkey, interfering in the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis. As for public statements, the British appear to be keeping an official distance from the crisis. Earlier this week the British and Canadian foreign ministers issued a short joint statement calling for an end to hostilities and a return to the negotiating table, while three days ago British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke by phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A short report in the Turkish media said Johnson expressed concern about the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean and also in Nagorno-Karabakh but not much else was revealed.
Now it is reported that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko and British Ambassador to Moscow Deborah Bronnert met to discuss ways to resolve the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. “The parties discussed the situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone and ways to resolve it, and exchanged views on some other pressing issues related to the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States],” a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said. However, this is a rather low_level of interchange if the British were seriously engaged in trying to solve the crisis.
By way of background, the British giant oil and gas company BP is one of the largest foreign oil and gas companies operating in Azerbaijan. The key troublemaker in the crisis is obviously Turkey, which is most likely enjoying the support of Britain. It is important to note that Boris Johnson is a founding member of the Conservative Friends of Turkey in the Conservative Party. As is well known his great-grandfather was a high Ottoman official named Ali Kemel, who married an Englishwoman. Kemel opposed Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s independence movement, because he wanted Turkey to become a protectorate of Great Britain, a position for which he was killed as a traitor. (Johnson is a name adopted by his grandfather.) Johnson often visited his relatives in Turkey. Both his Turkish uncle and Johnson’s cousin were high-level Foreign Ministry officials in Ankara.
