Iran helped prevent larger attacks by Azerbaijan against Armenia in September 2022. Armenian deputy foreign minister Vahan Kostanyan said this in an interview with Al-Monitor news website.

According to him, Azerbaijan has three objectives: the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, to provoke large-scale military tension in the region, and to push the Armenian side to give an extraterritorial corridor

“Iran is an important partner. The border with Iran is of utmost importance to us. We have two closed borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan, thus Iran and Georgia are our only gates to the outside world,” Kostanyan

“We had intelligence that larger attacks were being prepared by Azerbaijan when it attacked Armenia last September. Iranian actions and statements helped to stop a further deterioration of that situation,” the Armenian deputy FM added.

Al-Monitor, in turn, notes that Israel uses Azerbaijan against Iran. But in a bid to draw Baku to its side, Iran supported Azerbaijan, at least rhetorically, at the start of the 2020 war, not reckoning just how far Russia would allow it to advance.

Azerbaijan, in turn, seizing on Russian preoccupation in Ukraine and Iran’s domestic unrest, will go for a bigger prize: a land and rail corridor that would link Azerbaijan via Armenia’s southernmost province Syunik to its largest exclave Nakhichevan and on to Turkey. It would separate Iran from Armenia, its sole Christian neighbor and a vital stepping stone to Western markets.