The cross of the Church of All Saviors is black against a pale winter sky. Inside, between pink stone walls, a young priest swings frankincense in a silver thurible. Fragrant curls of smoke rise through shards of sunlight as Father Mesrop performs the liturgy in his rich baritone, joined by eleven worshippers—eight adults and three tiny children. The icons on the walls are simple, and there is none of the usual gilded splendor of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Since it was built in 2000, occupying the highest spot in the village of Musa Ler, the Church of All Saviors has mostly stayed locked. It was only when Father Mesrop and his congregation arrived in late 2023 that its door was opened, and sacred music filled its high roof.
Before, they would gather in Artsakh (known internationally as Nagorno-Karabakh), a scrap of territory in the Caucasus that has been at the center of a centuries-long tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. For most of the twentieth century it was ruled from Moscow, falling within the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.
Nagorno-Karabakh had a mixed population of Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis, who were shunted in and out of the region as the empire’s leaders tinkered with demographics on the fringes. The two groups turned on each other when the Soviet Union splintered, making one in a series of conflicts that erupted as ethnic and religious feuds resurfaced. The war in Nagorno-Karabakh bubbled up in the late 1980s and raged between 1992 and 1994; by the end, more than 25,000 people had been killed, a million more had fled their homes and the entire area was under the control of an ethnic Armenian administration.
Towns on the region’s fertile lowlands, once inhabited by Azerbaijani farmers and traders, were abandoned, then they were looted, landmined and turned into military buffer zones. Up in the mountains, the Artsakh Armenians formed a quasi-state, connected to Armenia proper by a single mountain road and surrounded on all other sides by frontlines with hostile Azerbaijan. Artsakh’s population hovered around 150,000, split between the cities of Shusha and Stepanakert and the villages dotted between. It was recognized as a sovereign state by nobody, not even Armenia itself, although it used the mother country as its link to the outside world, and its people were entitled to Armenian nationality. According to the United Nations and the rest of the world, Artsakh was Nagorno-Karabakh, the occupied territory of Azerbaijan.
Small nations on the edges of Europe are once again aligning themselves with the big powers….History tells us that the small tremors in these places are the first rumblings of something much bigger.
To Father Mesrop, it was simply home. He was born in the village of Astghashen on the lowlands, in 1964, when it was under the Soviet Union and religion was banned. But he watched his mother praying in secret each evening, and asked her who she was speaking to.
“Don’t disturb me!” she told the young boy.
When his mother fell sick with heart problems, Mesrop decided he should talk to the invisible person, too.
“I don’t know who you are, but please help,” he said to the sky.
It worked and his mother survived. Then he began seeing vivid dreams of angels, and years later, one in which he looked in a mirror and saw himself as a priest. He had never even seen a priest until then, he said. Now, he knew what his calling was.
There was a religious revival when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Armenian Church established an Artsakh diocese and held its first service in the thirteenth-century Gandzasar monastery, a complex built from Armenia’s famous pink-red stone and perched on a verdant hilltop. The last time the liturgy was heard within its walls was in 1930, just before Joseph Stalin shut down all the empire’s churches. Now they were opening up again, even as Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan gathered pace.
In 1992 Father Mesrop was posted to Shusha, which the Armenian forces had just captured. The ancient mountain city is sacred to both Armenians and Azerbaijanis; neither side recognizes the other’s claims on its stones and soil. Shusha’s population had been majority Azerbaijani at the end of the Soviet era but now all the Azerbaijanis had fled. Its mosques were left abandoned while its churches were rebooted. Father Mesrop became the custodian of the eighteenth-century St. John the Baptist, also known as the Green Church for the colored domes that once adorned its roof.
One of the first people to join his congregation was Gayana Albayan, who had learned about God through inference and overheard prayer. Her grandmother kept an icon of the Virgin Mary on top of her wardrobe, taking it down every Sunday to pray. But during the week, at school, Albayan’s teacher would tell her that there is no God. She ran to her grandmother for an explanation. “Your teacher is a believer too,” her grandmother told her, “but the system forces her to tell you otherwise.” Sure enough, when the churches reopened, Albayan’s teacher was in the front row of the first congregation.
During the war years of the 1990s, Albayan’s village fell on the frontline. When Grad rockets started falling she moved to Stepanakert, and then on to Shusha.
“Everything collapsed. But at the same time there was a spiritual revival,” she said. And once the war ended in 1994, in victory for the Armenian side, what Albayan called the “great period” began.
On the map it looked unpromising. Artsakh was a grey zone, a non-existent place, more famous for its in-between status than its monuments, natural beauty or history. An entire generation grew up in that status quo, known proudly among themselves as “the generation born into freedom.”
David Sarkisyan, the young priest swinging the incense beside Father Mesrop in Musa Ler, was born in 1997, three years after the war ended, and never knew the time when religion was banned and Artsakh did not exist. When he turned eighteen he was conscripted into the Artsakh army for two years, an obligation for every young man. There, he guarded the borders, sometimes exchanging pot shots with the Azerbaijanis. There were exchanges of fire nearly every day and landmines littered no-man’s-land. Albayan’s husband, Norik, was killed when a landmine exploded underneath him in 2014. It was on a country path that he had walked many times before. “But this time he was going down it on his horse,” she said. “The extra weight must have set it off.”
Life was otherwise parochial and peaceful. But by 2020 Artsakh’s status quo was shifting. Azerbaijan, already oil-rich, discovered gas under the Caspian Sea in the 1990s and the petrodollars pumped up its coffers. The once grimy boulevards of Baku, its seafront capital, were polished to a gleaming sparkle, and luxury brands replaced the bleak, half-stocked Soviet markets that once lined the seafront. Oil workers spent their fat pay cheques on the company of escorts who came to Baku from the less fortunate post-Soviet states. The petro-cash propped up the regime of Heydar Aliyev, a former Soviet apparatchik who was installed as Azerbaijan’s president in 1993, after a coup toppled Abulfaz Elchibey, the country’s first—and so far only—democratically elected leader.
Aliyev reassembled the Soviet-style police state, and when he died a decade later, power passed to his son, Ilham. The loss of Artsakh became the foundation of Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet national story, along with the promise that it would one day be returned. Most of the refugees from the region fended for themselves in shanty towns around Baku, despised by the urbanites even as their plight was weaponized. Ilham Aliyev continued his father’s dictatorial legacy, imprisoning his critics and enriching his family and cronies, while polishing his country’s image by hosting Formula One events and the Eurovision Song Contest.
On September 27, 2020, having replenished its arsenal with modern weaponry, Azerbaijan launched its first offensive on Artsakh. David Sarkisyan, like all other men of fighting age, was called up to the frontlines. Shusha was under bombardment. Father Mesrop took members of his congregation down to the deep basements of the Green Church, which had been designated an official shelter. It was impossible to leave the city. The Azerbaijanis used their new missiles and drones to attack from the sky, from morning until night. When there were breaks in the onslaught, anyone who could move rushed out to find food. Supplies ran low. With all the young men away at the frontlines, most of the bakeries stopped producing. Shusha’s landmark Ghazanchetsots Cathedral—known as the White Church for its gleaming limestone walls—was struck by Azerbaijani missiles.
The Green Church escaped unscathed, but the Artsakh army was outnumbered. After forty-four days, Artsakh’s political leaders signed a ceasefire deal that handed Shusha to Azerbaijan. The remaining civilians were told to leave the city immediately. They grabbed what they could and left, some to Stepanakert and others to Armenia proper. Father Mesrop did not have time to collect anything from the church where he had served for nearly thirty years. When Sarkisyan was discharged from the frontlines, he had no home city to return to.
As well as Shusha, Azerbaijan had recaptured the entire lowlands, seven districts that had been crumbling undisturbed for three decades. The area was riddled with landmines that would take years to defuse, but for Aliyev this was a storming win.
For the people of Artsakh, it was a catastrophe. After leaving his church Father Mesrop went to Stepanakert, where he stayed in his son’s house, then he was reposted to the church in Askeran, a mountain village close to the border with Azerbaijan. Russian peacekeepers came to monitor the ceasefire deal, and Father Mesrop was sure that Azerbaijan would not advance further. He was wrong.
In December 2022, Baku began ramping up the pressure again, blockading Stepanakert by cutting off its sole road to Armenia, and cutting its gas pipelines and electricity cables. Over the following months the city slowly starved.
In Askeran Father Mesrop planted vegetables in the church’s courtyard, thanking God that he was outside the city. But on September 18, 2023, Azerbaijan launched another offensive on the remaining stump of Artsakh, and the Russian peacekeepers did nothing to prevent it. This time, the war lasted just two days before the Artsakh government surrendered the rest of its country and dissolved itself. Three former Artsakh presidents and several other high-level officials were arrested and remain in Azerbaijani jails. More than 100,000 people, the entire population, fled.
Now, as a refugee, Father Mesrop is rebuilding his congregation in the Church of All Saviors in Musa Ler, a sleepy village half an hour’s drive from the capital, Yerevan, with a clear view of the triangular peak and snow cap of the sacred Mount Ararat in the distance.
The worshippers who come to Father Mesrop’s services each Sunday are the same people he ministered to in Shusha and Askeran; the village locals are not so interested, he says. David Sarkisyan is back by his side and Gayana Albayan’s voice fills this tiny space as it never could back in Shusha. Not that there is a Green Church to worship in now; satellite images show that it has been destroyed by its new custodians, wiped from the map like Artsakh itself.
*
This is a book about geopolitics, but it is also a book about people and the way that global events shape their lives. What unfolded in Nagorno-Karabakh between 2020 and 2023 was, on the surface, the latest chapter in a long-running conflict between two small countries; a clash rooted in ethnic and religious differences, playing out in a place that few people could place on the map. But underlying that war are broader global power shifts that have pulled Europe into a continent-wide conflict.
For the first time since the end of the Soviet Union, two broad global alliances, one centered around Russia, and the other around the more nebulous “West,” are clashing in a conventional war in Europe—and the frontlines now are less clear than they were during the Cold War. Countries like Hungary and Turkey are members of Western alliances, yet they are sliding into autocracy and maintain ties with Russia. There is no Iron Curtain dividing them, but a web of new militarized borders is spreading around the edge of the EU, in Greece, Poland and Hungary. There are also increasingly clear ideological camps, both national and intra-national. One camp is clinging desperately to liberal values: freedom of speech, the right to protest, fair elections and respect for pluralism, while the other is tending towards strongman autocracy and a nostalgia for conservative and religious values.
What’s happening today in some way resembles the period before the First World War, with pressure building at the fault lines between the big powers’ spheres of influence. These places have always been subject to imperial tugs-of-war. Cyprus was an asset traded between the Ottomans and British; the Balkans was the fractured region where the First World War kicked off; and Nagorno-Karabakh has long been a territory tortured by its position on the fringes.
Small nations on the edges of Europe are once again aligning themselves with the big powers. Borders and identities can be changed with brute force, but geopolitical pressure is also applied in more subtle ways: through local strongmen, co-opted by powerful patrons; the construction of new mosques and churches, as markers of religious nationalism; crackdowns on LGBT and women’s rights; and economic sweeteners and punishments. History tells us that the small tremors in these places are the first rumblings of something much bigger.
Having been underfunded for decades, NATO is relevant again. It now has a border with Russia that could turn hot at any time, stretching from the Arctic and through the Baltic, along the western edge of Belarus to the Black Sea. It also has a less tangible frontline in places like the Balkans, where mixed populations look to different patrons according to their ethnicity.
In some ways, NATO is stronger than during the Cold War. It has twice the members, and the newest tend to be most enthusiastic about defense spending. At conferences, in interviews and even off the record, NATO officials insist that whatever political disputes there may be between members, at the military level all are united. But the organization lacks something crucial compared to Russia: a strong idea of itself. Part of the problem for the West is that Russia, at least from the outside, is a cohesive unit—oppressive and economically dysfunctional, but largely united under the figurehead of Putin. The countries of the new West, meanwhile, are often as concerned with their internal divisions over migration and culture wars as they are with the cleavages splitting the continent.
The EU, meanwhile, is crumbling from within. The accumulated pressures of the 2008 economic crisis, followed by an influx of refugees and Brexit, has reduced it to a reactionary force fighting fires, rather than the visionary leadership the continent needs. The UK’s exit, as shambolic as it was, has emboldened Eurosceptics in France, Poland and Austria. Brussels, distracted by internal crises, is toothless to fight back, as member states diverge from its democratic norms or reimpose sovereign border controls.
Although soft power forgoes the use of direct violent force, it can split societies, foment violence and spark wars.
All of this is manna for autocratic leaders, who base much of their domestic propaganda on claims of Western weakness and hypocrisy. In the crises of Western institutions they see an opportunity to expand their own countries’ influence. They’re taking that opportunity in places like Nagorno-Karabakh, one of several new Cold War skirmishes that I visit in this book.
The latest wars in Nagorno-Karabakh were both an aftershock of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a manifestation of the rising ambitions of modern Europe’s two defining strongmen: the Russian president Vladimir Putin, and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The similarities between them are striking. They are perhaps the purest examples of twenty-first-century autocrats: leaders who rule through a mixture of genuine popularity, electoral and institutional meddling and outright oppression. Both men came to power at the turn of the century—literally in the case of Putin, who was appointed acting president of the Russian Federation on December 31, 1999 and fully inaugurated five months later. Erdoğan became Turkey’s prime minister on March 15, 2003, having already spent several years as the charismatic and controversial mayor of Istanbul. They are now among the longest-serving current heads of state. In the hubristic days after Assad fled Syria in December 2024, Erdoğan declared that he and Putin were now the “only two leaders in the world.”
Both men inherited economic basket cases. In Turkey, a decade of monetary mismanagement climaxed in 2001 with a stock market crash and massive currency devaluation. Russia experienced near-total economic collapse after the end of communism, as state-owned companies were gobbled up by the men who would become the oligarchs. The employment that those companies had once provided evaporated. Russia, like Turkey, suffered from hyperinflation in the 1990s and much of its population plunged into poverty. But in the first decade of the new century, these two leaders oversaw recoveries, and then booms. And both men, despite misgivings among parts of their own populations about their corrupt and authoritarian tendencies, were largely welcomed in the West as reformers and promising economic partners.
Turkey, already a NATO member, seemed to be poised on the doorstep of the European Union. Russia established relations with NATO in 1991, and galvanized them in 2002 with the setting up of the NATO-Russia Council. Around the old Soviet Empire’s western fringes, newly independent and democratizing nation states joined NATO and the EU.
Then things started going backwards. Putin began a neo-imperialist land grab, seizing territory around Russia’s hinterlands. He annexed Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008, and six years later he annexed Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, the outbreak of protests against Arab dictatorships in late 2010 reopened old Cold War divides in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, where Putin threw his full weight behind Bashar al-Assad. From the beginning of the conflict Moscow consistently used its place on the UN Security Council to veto Western resolutions condemning Assad.
From 2015, Russian jets carpet-bombed cities and their civilians across Syria to support Assad—a sign that Putin was no longer concerned about the rule of law or his international image. Turkey, meanwhile, backed the Syrian opposition, initially alongside Western countries including the UK, US and France. Some in the West spoke of Turkey as a model of “Islamic Democracy” for the emerging new Middle East, but Erdoğan’s motivations were more personal. He saw himself as the moral leader of the conservative, sometimes fundamentalist Islamist movements that came to dominate the Arab Spring opposition factions.
Putin and Erdoğan have something else in common: they both nurture ambitions to turn their countries into major powers with the ability to set the course of global events, and to end the era of American hegemony. Donald Trump in his second term is opening the way wide open for them. In late February 2025 I attended a lunch hosted by a European diplomat. He was forthright about the new reality Europe faced.
“If Russia were to invade the Baltics tomorrow, there is not a thing that Europe could do. Article 5 is dead,” he said.
We stared, open-mouthed.
“So what’s left of NATO?” I asked.
“Nothing. There is nothing left,” he replied.
The diplomat’s words confirmed what had been apparent for a while: that the threat of major war spreading across the continent had been accelerated by Trump’s re-election. The US president’s deposition of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in the opening days of 2026, swiftly followed by his threats to intervene in Iran and annex Greenland, only confirmed this. Really, though, the new global war has been underway for years.
While Putin’s Russia is a clear enemy for Europe, Erdoğan’s Turkey is more ambiguous. It is a NATO member and an EU candidate, and its position at the eastern fringe of Europe and as the custodian of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits hands it huge clout within both organizations. Erdoğan has undoubtedly turned into a full-blooded authoritarian, cracking down on his opposition at home while waging dubious wars overseas. Yet he has also fine-tuned the type of pragmatic, retail politics that has become the standard in the new West. He unashamedly uses Turkey’s position as the world’s biggest host of refugees to leverage money and political concessions from Europe, and he times his most egregious acts at home to coincide with moments of regional turmoil, when Europe relies on his cooperation. Furthermore, he is blessed with excellent diplomats who cover his iron fist with an urbane, English-speaking velvet glove.
Both Erdoğan and Putin are skilful soft-power players, who target the very places where the Ottoman, Russian and Soviet empires once rubbed up. Turkey’s soft-power card is religion, and its former status as the center of the Sunni Caliphate. Russia’s is language and the Soviet legacy; Russian is the common tongue that still unites people from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Putin uses Russia’s energy reserves to sweeten alliances and bully dependents, and nurtures relationships with Europe’s strongmen, penetrating his influence into the EU through Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and other Russia-friendly leaders, and creating angst within NATO through his continuing bromance with Erdoğan.
Although soft power forgoes the use of direct violent force, it can split societies, foment violence and spark wars. Putin and Erdoğan’s secret campaigns are being fought under the radar, in places that are torn between rival nation states and their conflicting understandings of the past and future. They are the West’s weak spots, the places where the global war is fueled with money-laundering and weapons stockpiles and where new small wars are always on the brink, the disputed territories dotted around the continent’s fringes where Russia, Turkey and the new West collide.
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Excerpted from Hinterlands: The New Cold War Brewing at the Peripheries of the West by Hannah Lucinda Smith. Copyright © 2026 by Hannah Lucinda Smith. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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