| Isn’t it humiliating? Armenia and Azerbaijan, two countries in which the EU has invested considerable diplomatic efforts, have accepted Iranian mediation for peace talks. No Western countries will be at Tehran’s table, though Russia and Turkey will. If talks are successful, the credit will therefore go to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, not European Council President Charles Michel, who has put many hours into mediation efforts between the two Central Asian countries. The Iranian official news agency IRNA quoted Tehran’s foreign ministry as saying the countries wanted to talk about regional issues “without the interference of non-regional and Western countries”. This development is not a huge surprise, given that the EU efforts to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan, two members of the EU’s Eastern Partnership, haven’t been convincing. EU countries have even asked the bloc’s diplomatic arm to come up with punitive sanctions should the situation deteriorate, but nothing ever materialised. The Nagorno-Karabakh endgame came recently, with Azerbaijan – militarily far more powerful than Armenia – swiftly taking over the breakaway region, with almost all of the ethnic Armenian population of 120,000 fleeing the enclave to mainland Armenia. Armenia felt betrayed by Russia, with which it had a defence agreement of sorts, and by the West, which didn’t put pressure on Azerbaijan, perhaps because it still needed Azeri gas. Left without friends, Yerevan looked toward Iran. | 