When President Donald Trump welcomed Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to the White House in August 2025, the ceremony celebrated more than just an end to decades of conflict. The agreement initialed between Yerevan and Baku—which grants the United States 99-year development rights to a transit corridor ambitiously named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP)—marked the most significant American strategic foothold in the Caucasus since the end of the Cold War. The deal’s immediate headlines focused on Trump’s diplomatic achievement and the economic opportunities for American companies. But the agreement’s deeper significance lies in what it reveals about a broader regional transformation: Russia’s steady loss of influence in the South Caucasus. And if recent history offers any guide, Moscow’s retreat from the South may foreshadow instability in the North Caucasus—a region most Americans have never heard of but that could pose serious challenges to European security.
The Trump deal represents the culmination of a striking pattern. For the first time in modern history, a major peace process in the Caucasus has bypassed Moscow entirely in favor of Western mediation. This would have been unthinkable even five years ago. Russia has dominated the Caucasus for more than two centuries, treating the region as its exclusive sphere of influence and mediating every significant dispute.
Consider the recent trajectory. When Azerbaijan and Armenia fought their 2020 war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia—despite a formal alliance with Armenia—remained passive, influenced by warming ties with Azerbaijan, displeasure with Armenia’s pro-Western Pashinyan government, and reliance on Baku-allied Turkey’s cooperation in Syria. By September 2023, when Azerbaijan’s offensive captured Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia—now deep in the Ukraine war and dependent on Turkey as an economic sanctions lifeline—proved unable to respond.
Russia’s diminished role created an opening the Trump administration seized. The TRIPP corridor will connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave via Armenian territory, fulfilling a longstanding Azerbaijani strategic objective while offering Armenia what a U.S. administration official framed as the route’s strategic benefit: enabling transit between Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia without passing through Iran or Russia. Armenia accepted the arrangement in exchange for promises of reciprocal transit access and what supporters describe as indirect U.S. security backing, though many Armenians view it as a bitter concession. Both Tehran and Moscow have condemned the project as encroachment—because that’s exactly what it is.
Even in Georgia, where the ruling party has adopted positions that are accommodating toward Russia, Moscow’s influence reflects opportunism more than strength. The Georgian Dream party’s stance stems from domestic political calculations, not Kremlin diktat, and operates against persistent public support for Euro-Atlantic integration. Russia benefits from Georgia’s current ambivalence without having engineered it.
The pattern is clear: Russia has lost its grip on the South Caucasus. Turkey, the United States, and to some extent China have filled the vacuum. The question is what comes next.
The North Caucasus comprises several Russian republics nestled in the mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas: Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, and others. Unlike the South Caucasus states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (which are independent countries), these territories are formally part of the Russian Federation.
But Russian control has always depended on a precarious arrangement. During the 19th century, the Russian Empire spent decades conquering the independent highland peoples of the North—but only after first securing the South Caucasus as a base of operations. In the 1990s, when Chechnya achieved de facto independence, Russia devoted enormous diplomatic and military resources to maintaining influence in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, suggesting Moscow viewed southern stability as essential to northern control.
This historical pattern raises an uncomfortable question: If Russia has definitively lost its dominant position in the South, can it maintain control in the North?
Russia manages the North Caucasus through what scholars describe as a three-pillar system: heavy security presence, massive federal subsidies, and personalistic patronage networks centered on regional strongmen. All three pillars now face mounting pressure.
The Ukraine war has drained the manpower that might otherwise maintain order in the North Caucasus. Federal budget transfers—once exceeding $6 billion annually to Chechnya alone—face constraints from wartime spending and economic sanctions. And the patronage networks show signs of strain, particularly in their dependence on Ramzan Kadyrov, who has been head of the Chechen Republic since 2007.
Kadyrov’s Chechnya operates with extraordinary autonomy within the Russian Federation. He implements parallel legal systems based partly on Islamic law, maintains private military forces loyal to him personally (the infamous Kadyrovtsy), and conducts independent diplomatic outreach to Middle Eastern states. This arrangement has kept Chechnya within Russia, but it has done so by conceding authorities Moscow would never grant other regional leaders.
The system rests on Kadyrov’s personal loyalty to Vladimir Putin, not to Russian institutions. Scholar Julie Wilhelmsen captured this dynamic precisely, describing Chechnya as a system in which “personalized loyalty substitutes for institutional coherence.” Reports of Kadyrov’s declining health raise succession questions Moscow appears unprepared to answer—made more urgent by the Chechen warlord’s public criticism of Russia’s top law enforcement officials in December 2024, a divergence from Kremlin messaging no other regional leader could afford.
Beyond Chechnya, the North Caucasus harbors numerous simmering disputes. Territorial grievances between Ingushetia and North Ossetia date back to Stalinist deportations. A 2018 border deal that ceded Ingush territory to Chechnya sparked mass protests. Ethnic tensions at the Dagestan-Azerbaijan border create mutual vulnerabilities. These disputes have been managed by Russia through security pressure and federal money—both of which are increasingly scarce.
North Caucasus instability would manifest in several ways. Renewed conflict within or between republics remains possible—the ethnic and territorial disputes are real, and Moscow’s capacity to suppress them has diminished. Ungoverned spaces could emerge where extremist groups reconstitute, reversing years of brutal counter-terrorism efforts.
External actors will take interest. Turkey has deep historical ties to North Caucasus peoples and won’t remain passive. Iran may recalculate its approach as its regional position shifts. Most concretely, energy infrastructure and transit routes that Europe depends on cross the region, and instability wouldn’t stay contained—it would ripple through the Black Sea region into Central and Western Europe.
So where does the U.S. come in? The Trump administration’s approach to the South Caucasus reflects what one official called a “very Trumpian” focus on trade and not “through the lens of someone else’s conflict.” The TRIPP corridor opens economic opportunities for American companies while advancing U.S. strategic interests. It’s transactional diplomacy aimed at concrete gains.
The North Caucasus presents a harder problem. Unlike Armenia and Azerbaijan, which are independent states that can sign agreements with Washington, the North Caucasus republics remain part of Russia. Direct American engagement with separatist movements would carry risks—nuclear security concerns, potential humanitarian crises, and unpredictable spillover effects—that even the most hawkish policymakers recognize.
Some analysts and Ukrainian officials have proposed institutionalizing Western support for North Caucasus peoples by embedding a “Caucasus track” in Euro-Atlantic strategy. These recommendations face substantial practical obstacles, and Western governments have shown limited appetite for policies that might accelerate Russian fragmentation.
A more realistic approach emphasizes scenario planning and contingency preparation. Western governments should understand potential trajectories of North Caucasus instability—from gradual erosion to sudden crisis—and prepare appropriate responses. This analysis makes no prediction about timing. Russia’s weakness is real but not absolute, and Moscow has proven adaptive before.
What seems indisputable is that the North Caucasus warrants closer attention than it has received. More broadly, Western policy must grapple with the reality that Russia itself may undergo profound political transformation in the coming years. Our frameworks for understanding the Caucasus presuppose the current Putinesque system, yet all signs point to significant changes ahead—changes that could arrive far sooner than comfortable assumptions allow.
The Trump administration’s success in brokering the Armenia-Azerbaijan deal demonstrates what’s possible when the United States engages seriously in the region. As the TRIPP corridor begins development, American policymakers would do well to look beyond immediate economic opportunities to the strategic landscape taking shape around them. The Caucasus is no longer Russia’s exclusive domain. The South has transformed. The North may follow, with consequences extending far beyond Russia’s borders.