By Laura Linderman and Lydia Sawatsky

The catastrophic flooding that struck Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan in late March and early April 2026, the worst rainfall event the republic has seen in over a century, has done more than damage homes and infrastructure. It has exposed the limits of Russian state capacity on its southern periphery at a moment when Moscow's grip on the wider Caucasus is already loosening, and it has done so along the precise ethnic and territorial seam where the Kremlin has long kept what the Chechen analyst Inal Sherip has called the "Lezgin card" in reserve. The Kremlin's belated and rhetorically defensive response, set against a more coherent Azerbaijani posture to the same storm, will accelerate Baku's strategic recalibration away from Moscow and rearrange political loyalties along the Lezgin cross-border zone in ways Russia has no current means to repair.

BACKGROUND:

Between March 27 and April 8, an unusually intense Caspian cyclone delivered rainfall to Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan that meteorologists in both countries have described as a record-breaking event of a scale not seen in 107 years. At an April 9 meeting on the disaster, Vladimir Putin himself observed that "since meteorological observations began, in 1882, such figures have never been recorded in the region." By that point, at least seven people had been confirmed dead in Dagestan, more than 6,200 had been evacuated, around 1.5 million had been affected in some way, and over 6,000 residential buildings had been damaged or submerged. The Gedzhukh reservoir dam in Derbentsky district was overtopped on April 5, sweeping cars off the federal motorway. Sections of the Caucasus federal motorway and the North Caucasus Railway were severed, and three substations in Makhachkala (Primorskaya, Vostochnaya, and Makhachkala-110) were flooded and temporarily knocked offline. Yuri Chaika, the Presidential Plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus Federal District, put initial damage at over one billion rubles. On April 7, Putin directed the elevation of the regional emergency to federal status, with the formal designation issued by the government commission on April 9.

The same storm did not stop at the international border. In Azerbaijan, it caused fatal flooding in Baku's Yeni-Ramana settlement on March 27 and 28, the death of a man swept away by floodwaters in Gusar district on April 5, and the collapse of a house in Baku's Sabunchu district on the night of April 7. The worst-affected Azerbaijani districts (Gusar, Khachmaz, and Quba) are precisely those where the country's Lezgin minority is most heavily concentrated.

The official Russian response combined high-profile federal visits with a striking reluctance to take responsibility. Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Kurenkov, Construction Minister Irek Faizullin, and Natural Resources Minister Alexander Kozlov all traveled to Dagestan. Sergei Melikov, the head of Dagestan, nevertheless attributed the loss of life among motorists swept off the federal motorway to local "carelessness," and blamed flooding in Makhachkala on "reckless" real estate development. Residents were not persuaded. Novaya Gazeta Europa quoted a resident of Mamedkala who said that the only reason fatalities had not run into the dozens was that locals were pulling each other from the floodwaters themselves. Moscow's instinct to manage the crisis through televised commission meetings rather than visible mobilization on the ground reflects a federal centre that is overstretched, not one choosing restraint.

IMPLICATIONS:

The political significance of the floods extends beyond the disaster itself, because they have arrived at a moment when several reinforcing trends across the Caucasus are converging.

The first is the visible thinness of Russian state capacity outside the Kremlin's core priorities. In the same week Moscow elevated the Dagestan emergency, it absorbed the loss of its last functioning railway ferry across the Kerch Strait to Ukrainian drone strikes. Federal budget transfers, once routine for the North Caucasus, are now constrained by wartime spending and sanctions. Chronic unemployment, entrenched corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure, and reliance on heavy-handed security policies remain unresolved across the North Caucasus, continuing to fuel local grievances. The entire Kadyrov model of patronage-based stability rests on a federal balance sheet that is no longer flush, and the perception of decline now circulates openly in exile and opposition spaces. In late April, the former Chechen deputy prime minister Ruslan Kutaev, who now leads the Assembly of Peoples of the Caucasus, publicly claimed that "everyone knows Putin has lost" and that the great majority of Kadyrov's forces would switch sides at the right moment. The claim is contested, but its open airing is itself a marker of what exile figures now feel free to assert.

The second is the changing posture of Baku. Azerbaijan, hit by the same storm, has handled its response more conventionally. The country has its own constraints; residents in Baku's Yeni-Ramana settlement blocked a road in late March to protest inadequate drainage after rainfall killed two people near a damaged power cable, and Baku city authorities attributed some of the worst flooding to housing built without compliance with safety codes. But Baku has not attributed specific deaths to the carelessness of the dead. Through its Ministry of Emergency Situations, it has evacuated more than 450 people from flood zones, issued regular briefings, announced an expansion of its agricultural insurance regime to cover flood losses on April 8, and on April 28 President Ilham Aliyev allocated 85.9 million manat (approximately 50 million USD) from his reserve fund for flood relief. The political tone in Azerbaijani state media has been one of administrative competence and immediate action rather than recrimination.

This contrast matters because Azerbaijan has spent the past eighteen months systematically distancing itself from Moscow. Following the December 2024 destruction of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 by Russian air defenses over Grozny, and the June 2025 Yekaterinburg raids in which two ethnic Azerbaijani brothers died in Russian custody, Baku closed the Russian House, suspended Sputnik Azerbaijan, sued Russia internationally, and at the February 2026 Munich Security Conference President Aliyev publicly accused Moscow of three deliberate strikes on Azerbaijani diplomatic facilities in Kyiv. The trajectory has only accelerated. On April 25, four days after the federal emergency was declared in Dagestan, Aliyev hosted Volodymyr Zelensky in Gabala on the Ukrainian leader's first visit to the South Caucasus since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and the two presidents signed six bilateral agreements concentrated on defense-industrial cooperation, joint production, and the deployment of Ukrainian drone specialists in Azerbaijan. Every image of Russian inadequacy on Azerbaijan's northern doorstep validates Baku's strategic choice.

Baku's confidence rests on more than rhetoric. The early-2026 strikes on Iran have reduced the third regional power with traditional interests in the borderlands to silence born of weakness rather than restraint, and the Iran war has paralysed the International North-South Transport Corridor through banking and insurance restrictions, redirecting Eurasian cargo to the Trans-Caspian route through Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, where demand surged 450 to 500 percent in a single week. Baku has also kept its land borders, including with Russia, closed since the COVID-19 pandemic, retaining the closure for political reasons. There are no longer direct flights from Baku to any Dagestani or Chechen city. That Azerbaijan can simultaneously absorb a war next door, manage the diversion of Eurasian transit through its own ports, and project administrative competence in a domestic flood response is itself a measure of how far the regional balance has shifted.

The third element, and the most underappreciated, is the cross-border ethnic dimension. The areas of Dagestan worst affected, Derbentsky and Magaramkentsky districts and the southern coastal belt, are the historic homeland of the Lezgin people, who number roughly 800,000 in southern Dagestan and between 180,000 and 260,000 in northern Azerbaijan. As Sherip notes, demographics heighten fragility: Dagestan alone hosts an Azerbaijani community of roughly 120,000, more than a third of the population of Derbent, while Azerbaijan hosts approximately 250,000 Lezgins and Avars, meaning any cross-border incident would almost inevitably spill across the frontier. Sergei Melikov, notably, is the first ethnic Lezgin to head Dagestan; with a Lezgin father and a Russian mother, he was born in Orekhovo-Zuyevo near Moscow and made his career in the federal security services, with no ties to Dagestan or its local elites before Putin appointed him acting head in October 2020. The Samur River that forms much of the international border is itself part of the flood story. Moscow has historically managed this frontier by holding the "Lezgin card" in reserve, quietly cultivating the Sadval movement and other Lezgin nationalist organizations in the 1990s as leverage against Baku and then letting them wither when Azerbaijani concessions were required. The flood inverts this calculation. A perception that Moscow neither protects nor compensates Lezgins on its side of the border, while Baku at least musters a coherent administrative response on its side, is the kind of fact that reshapes long-term political loyalties at the margins.

The fourth element is recent political memory. The September 2022 anti-mobilization protests in Makhachkala and Endirei were the largest in the North Caucasus and the first significant public unrest in the republic in a decade. They were touched off by the same dynamic now visible in the flood response: a federal centre that extracts more from Dagestan than it provides. The flood does not, by itself, manufacture a protest movement. But the conditions that produced 2022 (the perception of federal extraction, official contempt for local life, and the absence of meaningful Dagestani representation in Moscow's calculations) are all reinforced by what Dagestanis are seeing this month. Dagestan has been disproportionately mobilized for the war in Ukraine, has been chronically underfunded for infrastructure, and is now being told by its own governor that its dead were simply careless.

CONCLUSIONS:

The Dagestan floods of 2026 will not, in themselves, dislodge Sergei Melikov or destabilize the Russian Federation's hold on its southern periphery. Melikov's regional security apparatus remains coherent, and the federal centre has committed visible resources. What the floods will do is accelerate trends already in motion. Baku will read the contrast between the two responses as further confirmation that its strategic distancing from Moscow carries declining costs, a reading already legible in the Gabala signings of April 25. Yerevan, watching from across the South Caucasus, will draw the same conclusion: that a Russian state which cannot compensate flood victims on its own southern periphery is unlikely to provide the security guarantees it has long been asked to provide. The Lezgin cross-border community will quietly absorb the lesson that the federal centre will mobilize cameras before it mobilizes pumps. Western policymakers, who have spent the past year recalibrating their approach to the South Caucasus in the wake of the TRIPP framework and Vice President Vance's February 2026 visit to the region, will find that Moscow's regional credibility has eroded slightly further in a part of the Russian Federation where that erosion was supposed to be impossible. As AFPC Senior Fellow Mamuka Tsereteli has argued, the war in Ukraine has produced a paradox for American strategy: it has reduced Russia's long-term strategic power even as it has hardened Moscow into a more risk-tolerant adversary. The window for Western policymakers to lock in this regional shift remains open, but it will not stay open forever. The floodwaters in Dagestan will recede in the coming weeks. The political water table in the Caucasus has shifted by a measurable amount, and it is shifting in the same direction in which the rivers are running, south, away from a centre that no longer commands them.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Laura Linderman is a Senior Fellow and Director of Programs at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the American Foreign Policy Council, and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center. Lydia Sawatsky is a researcher at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.

By Eduard Abrahamyan

In recent months, Armenia and Russia have strengthened their relations. A series of high-level meetings shows not just a return to normal diplomacy but a purposeful reshaping of their alliance. Alongside President Putin’s renewed ties with Azerbaijani President Aliyev and the Kremlin’s broader adjustment of its regional strategy, the revived dialogue between Putin and Prime Minister Pashinyan forms part of a wider diplomatic renewal. This shift marks a clear easing of the tensions that strained their bilateral relations from September 2022 to mid-2024.



                                                                        Credit: Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND: The intensified Armenia–Russia bilateral reengagement commenced on October 8, 2024, with the Moscow meeting between Putin and Pashinyan, ostensibly ending a two-year estrangement stemming from Moscow’s inaction and the CSTO’s reluctance to deter or even explicitly identify Azerbaijan as the initiator of the September 2022 incursions into Armenian territory. Equally detrimental was the perception that Moscow had tacitly approved Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military operation in Karabakh.

The October 2024 meeting set both sides on a path toward a “new rhythm” in strategic relations, creating the basis for a renewed partnership aimed at resolving the “misunderstandings” that had emerged, as later described by Foreign Ministers Ararat Mirzoyan and Sergey Lavrov. The two leaders have since maintained regular contact through phone calls and in-person meetings throughout 2025. Yerevan also hosted several high-level Russian delegations, underscoring the breadth and institutional depth of the renewed dialogue. Diplomatic sources described this reset as a key turning point that effectively ended the period of tension, with both governments instructing their institutions to pursue a full realignment across all areas of strategic cooperation.

In January and May 2025, the foreign ministers made reciprocal visits, each reaffirming the start of a “new page” in the strategic partnership through “genuine and open discussions on accumulated issues.” This diplomatic thaw reached its peak in June 2025 with the visit of Valentina Matviyenko, Chairwoman of Russia’s Federation Council, to Yerevan, aimed at strengthening parliamentary cooperation. Matviyenko’s visit not only supported Armenia’s evolving foreign policy direction but also highlighted the Kremlin’s engagement in Armenia’s domestic politics. Her meetings in Yerevan were widely seen as a sign of Moscow’s friendly neutrality, or even quiet support for the ruling Civil Contract party ahead of Armenia’s general elections planned for June 2026. After her meeting with Prime Minister Pashinyan on 6 June, Matviyenko stated that “[Pashinyan] conveyed greetings to our president and emphasized that, despite insinuations, he and [Putin] have always maintained constructive, substantive relations without any issues,” sending a clear message to the “ill-wishers” that no divisions exist between the Armenian and Russian leadership.

The revival of high-level diplomacy has taken place alongside Pashinyan’s participation in international forums led or co-funded by Russia. In May 2025, he attended Moscow’s Victory Day parade, one of Putin’s most visible displays of state power and ideological authority. Pashinyan also traveled to Kazan to join the sixteenth BRICS Summit, which the Kremlin presented as proof that Western efforts to isolate Russia had failed. In July, Armenia’s Prime Minister took part in the International Conference on Nature and Environmental Protection in the Altai, supporting Putin’s broader vision of portraying Russia not as a marginal actor in the Turkic world but as the guardian of its historical and cultural origins amid the growth of the Organization of Turkic States. Later, Pashinyan attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, where Pakistan blocked Armenia’s application for full membership. Armenia would otherwise likely have joined one of the most rapidly consolidating non-Western frameworks, arguably challenging the West.

The recent strengthening of Armenia–Russia relations is closely linked to economic interdependence and the gradual improvement of Russia’s public image in Armenia. Economically, Russia has reaffirmed its role as Armenia’s main trading partner, with trade turnover reaching a record US$ 12.4 billion in 2024, more than twice the level recorded in 2022. According to investigative reports, this increase reflects the function of both Armenia and Azerbaijan as logistical intermediaries in Moscow’s sanction-evasion networks. Armenia’s re-export channels have supported the transfer of dual-use goods to, and embargoed gold from, Russia, while Azerbaijan has discreetly facilitated the re-export of Russian hydrocarbons. Together, these practices have formed a coordinated and mutually beneficial regional mechanism that reinforces the Kremlin’s economic resilience. In September 2025, during the World Atomic Week conference in Moscow, Pashinyan and Putin agreed that Rosatom would extend the operation of the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant for another decade, ensuring continued supply of over 30 percent of Armenia’s electricity. Official statements also noted that the two leaders discussed the potential construction of a new reactor by Rosatom to address Armenia’s concerns about the ageing Soviet-era facility.

Russia’s public image in Armenia has begun to recover from its low point in 2022–2023. A July 2025 poll by the International Republican Institute shows a clear improvement in public attitudes: the share of respondents viewing Russia as the “greatest threat” fell to 27 percent (down from 40 percent the previous year), while 45 percent now regard Russia as Armenia’s most important political partner, an 18-point increase since 2024. This change in perception is driven less by traditional Russian information campaigns or local pro-Russian media than by a deliberate adjustment of Armenia’s state-controlled narrative, which now tends to present Russia in a “pragmatically” neutral light. The outcome is a gradual restoration of public ambivalence, a sentiment neither strongly pro- nor anti-Russian, that mirrors Yerevan’s cautious process of re-accommodation with Moscow.

IMPLICATIONS: The ongoing renegotiation of the Russia–Armenia alliance, alongside Putin’s renewed rapprochement with Azerbaijan as shown at the CIS Dushanbe summit in October, suggests that the recurring “crises” in Moscow’s relations with Yerevan and Baku are not genuine strategic breaks. Instead of marking major shifts, these episodes usually reflect short-term tactical frictions, temporary disagreements that each side manages or uses to achieve immediate political or diplomatic goals.

Such frictions are often exaggerated in Western discussions as signs of a major geopolitical shift, whether portrayed as Armenia’s “pro-Western pivot” or Azerbaijan’s alleged “anti-Russian turn.” In reality, the situation is more nuanced. Both Yerevan and Baku often highlight the appearance of tension with Moscow for strategic purposes, using the perceived distance from Russia to strengthen their negotiating position with Western partners.

For Armenia, this approach supports a dual narrative: expressing European ambitions to gain sympathy and investment while keeping practical ties with Russia for various reasons. Pashinyan’s shifting engagement with the CSTO reflects this duality—not an actual withdrawal, but an effort to push the bloc to act while maintaining reassurance toward Western partners. Likewise, the 2024 removal of Russian border guards from the Armenia–Iran border was largely symbolic, affecting only the Agarak–Nordooz checkpoint, while Russian software systems and personnel continued to operate.

Azerbaijan follows a similar strategy, occasionally dramatizing its disagreements with Moscow to project strategic independence while maintaining practical cooperation. As Aliyev stated during his meeting with Putin in Dushanbe, despite the December plane incident, the “relationship has successfully developed across many areas,” which Putin hoped would “continue in the spirit of our alliance.” Despite symbolic disputes, Baku and Moscow continue to collaborate in energy, transport, and security, including through the “3+3” regional platform and trilateral projects involving Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Iran. These selective displays do not mean that all tensions are artificial or coordinated. Real disagreements remain, such as over Moscow’s security obligations to Armenia or the oil contamination scandal involving Russian exports passing through Azerbaijani infrastructure to the EU, but Pashinyan and Aliyev rarely cross Moscow’s strategic boundaries. Thus, what appears as instability often serves to renegotiate hierarchies rather than to overturn them.

For Moscow, this managed ambiguity remains advantageous. By allowing limited dissent and some visible distance, Russia maintains its regional influence while appearing less intrusive, “being present by seeming absent.” This recently adopted strategy enables Putin to exercise influence without attracting too much Western attention. From Moscow’s viewpoint, even Western-backed initiatives such as the August 8 Armenia–Azerbaijan Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) infrastructure deal are not viewed as threatening. Instead, TRIPP is seen as fitting into Russia’s wider connectivity strategy, linking Russia and Turkey through Azerbaijan, similar to how the North–South corridor connects Russia and Iran. The Kremlin’s reasoning assumes that regional realities, codified by the November 9, 2020, trilateral agreement, will eventually force Washington either to cooperate with Moscow or to withdraw from the project.

For Yerevan, adopting a “region-first” policy means engaging with Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Iran, even while maintaining pro-Western rhetoric. The March 2025 parliamentary resolution to start EU membership talks serves mostly performative and domestic aims rather than indicating a real policy shift. The Pashinyan government continues to emphasize the advantages of the Eurasian Economic Union and has applied to join the SCO, showing how Western-oriented language coexists with lasting non-Western partnerships.

Moscow’s acceptance of this balancing comes from its belief that Pashinyan’s EU-focused gestures do not present a real threat. This explains the Kremlin’s restrained reaction to events such as the arrest of Russian-Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan, who has fallen out of favor in Putin’s circles. Putin does not oppose either Pashinyan or Aliyev; rather, he views both as cooperative actors within Russia’s changing regional strategy. This approach is reflected in the Kremlin’s “warm neutrality,” expressed by Matviyenko toward Pashinyan before Armenia’s elections, and in Putin’s calculated revelation at the Dushanbe summit about Ramiz Mehtiyev’s planned coup against Aliyev. 

CONCLUSIONS: At this stage, Armenia–Russia relations highlight the growing gap between outward perception and internal reality in the region. To Western observers, Armenia’s pursuit of European integration and broader multilateral ties may seem like a gradual move away from Moscow’s sphere of influence. Yet beneath this surface lies a more complex and regionally rooted dynamic. It suggests that the Kremlin is rethinking its approach in the South Caucasus, developing a coordinated and flexible form of engagement with both Armenia and Azerbaijan that hides the full extent of Russian influence while strengthening the illusion that Russia is withdrawing. This adjustment gives all three actors subtle room to maneuver, allowing for a shared strategy of cooperative dominance and geopolitical maskirovka.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr Eduard Abrahamyan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Security Analysis and author of Small States, Russia and the West: Polarity, Constellations and Heterogeneity in the Geopolitics of the Caucasus (Routledge, 2025).

By Stephen Blank

February 9, 2024

Virtually every assessment of trends in Central Asia since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and many preceding analyses have postulated a decline in most if not all dimensions of Russian influence and capacity. To be sure, Russia’s imperial aspirations and ability to indulge in them remain central to Russian policy. Nevertheless, that capacity and ability to give this area the attention it merits has visibly declined, not least regarding defense policy. That decline has opened and continues to create opportunities for other interested parties to raise their regional profile, including China, Turkey, India, the EU, and the U.S.

By Alexander Yeo and Dr. Emil A. Souleimanov

October 26, 2023

The demise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, in August marks a time of change for the Russian elite. Chechnya’s strongman Ramzan Kadyrov is one of the members of the elite most likely to take advantage of the situation to strengthen his own position. In contrast to Prigozhin’s unpredictability, Kadyrov represents a controllable alternative for Putin given his utter reliance on the Russian President, and thus will be able to provide loyalty and stability through his own private security apparatus. The utilization of this apparatus, however, presents risks for Kadyrov. Therefore, Kadyrov is likely to look to improve his internal political position within Russia in the coming months. 

By Mamuka Tsereteli

August 11, 2022

Kazakhstan, and Central Asia in general, needs a long-term energy and commodity export strategy. Economic and energy security for the landlocked countries requires diversification of the transportation options for export and import. Europe will need every extra barrel of oil it can get, and Kazakhstan needs reliable markets, so uninterrupted access to resources and markets through trusted connectivity with the likeminded countries should always be the priority in all times, good and bad.