Russia has its hands full with geopolitics and did not have Armenia’s back when Azerbaijan seized the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in a military operation last month, an analyst says.

“Russia washed its hands after the beginning of the war in Ukraine – the South Caucasus, Karabakh, etc is not the centre of Russian thinking,” said Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Caucasus Institute.

“The guys are busy in Ukraine. We don’t have weapons from them, which we had before. Politically, you know [Russian President Vladimir] Putin every morning, he does not look at the map of Nagorno-Karabakh. He looks at another map,” he told Al Jazeera.