The Armenians got run out of Nagorno-Karabakh by the Azerbaijanis and the 2,000-man Russian peacekeeping force didn't keep much in the way of peace.
“We feel very alone and abandoned,” said Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, Mr. Pashinyan’s former foreign minister.The Armenians were getting genocided at Ottoman hands since before "genocide" was even a word, so the bad blood goes back a long way in that neighborhood.
That is not a good place to be for a country in the South Caucasus, a volatile region of the former Soviet Union where the destiny of small nations has for centuries been determined by the interests and ambitions of outside powers.
“Mentally we live in Europe, but geographically we live in a very different place,” said Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Caucasus Institute, a research group in Yerevan. “Our neighbors are not Switzerland and Luxembourg, but Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan.”
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