By Elchin Alioglu | Baku Network
On August 8, 2025, Washington became the stage for a seismic shift in the South Caucasus. Against the backdrop of high-stakes talks between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and U.S. President Donald Trump, the foreign ministers of both countries — Jeyhun Bayramov of Azerbaijan and Ararat Mirzoyan of Armenia — initialed a draft bilateral peace agreement. More importantly, they signed a joint declaration addressed to the OSCE chair-in-office, calling for the termination of the Minsk process and the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group, including the mandate of the Chair’s Personal Representative and the High-Level Planning Group.
That move effectively closed the curtain on a three-decade-long experiment in conflict mediation — one that, as hindsight makes brutally clear, was among the least productive diplomatic platforms in OSCE history. The decision carries not only institutional and legal ramifications but also a symbolic punch: it cements a new paradigm for the region’s security architecture. Conflicts, the message is, should be resolved by those directly involved — not indefinitely frozen under the watch of outside moderators.
The Minsk Group: Anatomy of a Failure
The Minsk Group was born in March 1992, created by a decision of the OSCE’s (then CSCE) senior officials meeting in Budapest. Its formal mission was to facilitate a peaceful settlement of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Karabakh through a “Minsk Conference.” That conference never materialized. Instead, the group degenerated into a perpetually stalled triumvirate of co-chairs — the U.S., Russia, and France — each carrying not only competing interests but, as documents declassified after 2020 revealed, agendas that were anything but neutral.
The UN Security Council’s Resolution 853 (1993) explicitly recognized Armenia’s occupation of Azerbaijani territories and demanded a full withdrawal. Yet across its entire lifespan, the Minsk Group failed to deliver even a semblance of enforcement. In fact, as a 2021 report by the European Institute of Security Policy concluded, the group was “structurally designed to avoid putting the conflict within the bounds of international law, operating in a logic of management rather than resolution.”
A Legal and Geopolitical Vacuum
Under the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the OSCE’s institutions are bound to uphold the territorial integrity of states. But the Minsk Group spent thirty years dodging that core obligation. It took no meaningful action to restore Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over its occupied districts, despite overwhelming international recognition of Baku’s claims.
By the early 2010s, the group had morphed into little more than a status quo preservation tool. As George Washington University law professor Thomas Grant put it, “The Minsk Group was a mechanism for managing expectations, not resolving contradictions. It’s a textbook case of institutional drift.”
For years, its activities amounted to little more than ceremonial visits, press releases, and diplomatic theater. After the Four-Day War in 2016 — and especially following the 44-Day War in 2020 — even that thin veneer of purpose collapsed. President Aliyev repeatedly emphasized that the group had no mandate left to justify its existence.
Post-Conflict Realities and the New Regional Order
Azerbaijan’s restoration of its territorial integrity in the Second Karabakh War (2020) fundamentally altered the landscape. In international law and diplomacy, when the object of a dispute disappears, so does the legitimacy of any mediation body.
From 2021 onward, Baku’s message was unequivocal: the “Karabakh conflict is over,” and the Minsk Group “has no legal or political ground to exist.” Neutral observers echoed that line. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in a 2022 policy brief, described the Minsk Group as “an anachronism post-2020, with its continued existence serving the ambitions of its co-chairs more than the cause of peace.”
The August 2025 decision in Washington sealed what had long been obvious: the OSCE Minsk Group was never a bridge to peace, but a theater of delay. Its demise marks not a loss, but the clearing of deadwood — and the recognition that real conflict resolution must be owned, and delivered, by the parties themselves.
The Legal and Diplomatic Weight of the August 8 Declaration
The joint appeal by the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia to Finland, which currently chairs the OSCE, was more than a political gesture. It carried a clear legal meaning as well. By formally agreeing to dissolve the mediation framework of the Minsk Group, both sides effectively invoked what international practice calls a “mutual renunciation of mediation mechanism.”
This principle is enshrined in OSCE precedent. The Final Document of the 1989 Vienna Meeting spelled it out plainly: “With the consent of both parties, the sides to a conflict may notify the mediator of the termination of his mandate if they conclude that continued mediation no longer serves their interests” (OSCE Final Document, Vienna Meeting 1989, Section V).
In that sense, Baku and Yerevan’s move was not a legal gamble but a legitimate step — one firmly rooted in OSCE’s own precedent.
Finland as the Mediator of Closure
On August 9, Finnish diplomat Toni Sandell confirmed that consultations had begun inside the OSCE on winding down the Minsk Group. That procedural trigger sets in motion the legal process for dismantling not only the Group itself but also the mandate of the Chair’s Personal Representative and the related High-Level Planning Group.
As Matti Laakso, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki, put it: “This is not just the termination of an institution — it’s the symbolic end of an era of diplomatic hypocrisy on the Karabakh question.”
The joint decision by Baku and Yerevan represents more than bureaucratic housekeeping. It signals a shift in the logic of peacemaking: from externally imposed dictates to internal consensus. The South Caucasus is now entering a post-Minsk phase, where the leading actors are the states of the region themselves, not outside brokers with competing agendas.
For historians and policy analysts, the Minsk Group will endure as a case study in diplomatic stagnation — and as a warning about the dangers of clinging to artificial mediation frameworks. Its closure is less a technical adjustment than a marker of political maturity. In that sense, the true legacy of August 2025 may lie not in the peace deal alone, but in the lesson that the region no longer needs scaffolding to hold itself up.
France and Russia: Fighting to Keep Their Grip
From the moment the Second Karabakh War ended in November 2020, France and Russia — two of the Minsk Group’s three co-chairs — waged a quiet, often desperate battle to keep the platform alive. Their efforts rested on shaky ground, fueled more by inertia and geopolitical reflex than by legal justification.
Paris, especially under Emmanuel Macron, tried to leverage the Minsk Group as a stage for pressuring Azerbaijan. Starting in 2021, proposals to “revive the Minsk process” surfaced in both chambers of the French parliament, often couched in rhetoric that placed blame squarely on Baku. In December 2022, the French Senate went so far as to pass a resolution urging the government to “step up efforts within the Minsk Group” (Sénat français, Résolution n°103, 2022). For Azerbaijani analysts, it was a transparent attempt by Paris to claw back lost influence.
But those efforts ignored two fundamental realities: first, that Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity had already been restored; second, that international law provided no mandate for mediation once the object of the dispute disappeared. Politically, Paris’s stance was less about peace than about placating its domestic Armenian lobby. As French scholar Jean-Baptiste Jejel observed, “In an era of geopolitical marginalization, France increasingly uses foreign policy as an extension of its domestic electoral campaigns, especially in relation to the Armenian lobby” (Revue Défense Nationale, 2023).
Moscow, by contrast, played a subtler game. Russia stopped short of openly demanding the Minsk Group’s continuation, but its diplomatic messaging — particularly from the Foreign Ministry — was laced with nods to the group’s “ongoing importance.” At the same time, the Kremlin hedged its bets through parallel diplomacy: deploying peacekeepers and managing direct channels with both Yerevan and Baku. This approach effectively bypassed the OSCE while still keeping the brand of the Minsk Group on life support.
It was a textbook case of what Oxford’s Timothy Garton Ash calls a “conflict ownership strategy” — holding the conflict within one’s sphere of influence less to resolve it than to control it. For Moscow, the Minsk Group was never about arbitration; it was about leverage.
That’s why Russia resisted to the very end any talk of liquidation. Losing the Minsk Group meant surrendering a pressure point over both Armenia and Azerbaijan. But once Yerevan itself signed the Washington declaration, Moscow’s last defense crumbled. What remained was the image of a power clutching at a format that no longer existed — a relic of influence, dissolved by the very states it once sought to manage.
A Global Precedent: The Minsk Group and the Bankruptcy of International Mediation
The fate of the OSCE Minsk Group is not an outlier. History is littered with institutions that began with lofty goals only to collapse under the weight of their own irrelevance, serving as cautionary tales of what happens when diplomacy becomes procedural theater instead of conflict resolution.
UNPROFOR in the Former Yugoslavia. The UN’s peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia — UNPROFOR (1992–1995) — has become a textbook case of institutional paralysis. Despite Security Council resolutions and a clear mandate to protect civilians, it failed to stop the Srebrenica massacre and allowed the obstruction of humanitarian aid. As the UN Secretary-General later admitted in a 1999 report, “UNPROFOR proved unable to adapt to the character of the conflict or to defend the civilian population” (UN Secretary-General Report, A/54/549, 1999).
The Kosovo Contact Group. The Kosovo Contact Group, made up of the U.S., Russia, the EU, and the UN, followed a similar pattern of symbolic mediation without teeth. Its pronouncements lacked binding force, and the eventual unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo in 2008 underscored the impotence of the format.
The Normandy Format. In Ukraine, the “Normandy Four” — Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia — emerged in 2014 as a vehicle for negotiating peace. But the group proved incapable of implementing the Minsk agreements. By 2022, the format had collapsed entirely, undone by conflicting interests among its members and the absence of any enforcement mechanism.
The Minsk Group as Procedural Diplomacy Without Resolution
The OSCE Minsk Group will now take its place alongside these failures as the archetype of procedural diplomacy without resolution. For thirty years it functioned on paper while obstructing justice in practice, substituting political balancing acts for the clear principles of international law.
Its liquidation is more than just bureaucratic housekeeping. It is a conceptual watershed: a recognition that the era of postmodern mediation — where process masquerades as substance and procedure replaces the will to resolve — has reached its end.
Azerbaijan and Armenia, despite all their differences, have converged on one essential point: the responsibility to determine their own fate rests with them, not with foreign brokers. The demise of the Minsk Group is not just its failure — it is its liberation. For the first time in decades, the region can breathe without the ballast of institutional helplessness.
