Beyond Frozen Conflict: Scenarios for the Separatist Disputes of Eastern Europe

The five unresolved separatist conflicts of the post-Soviet space in Eastern Europe are a risk to Europe’s stability and security. Four of these - Abkhazia; South Ossetia; Transnistria; and Nagorny Karabakh all date back to the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1991-92 and have become known as frozen conflicts. The fifth is Ukraine’s Donbas, which saw large parts of its Donetsk and Luhansk regions split violently from Kyiv in 2014, at a cost of 13,000 human lives so far, mainly due to Russia’s support of hybrid warfare there.

This book is the first to give an up-to-date account of all five conflicts in an analytically consistent manner. Uniquely, it explores a full range of scenarios for the possible future of all five conflicts and offers a basis of sound information for officials, diplomats, scholars and the general public.

The first edition of this book, published in mid-2020, correctly saw the unresolved conflict over Nagorny Karabakh as the most likely to see a new war, which is precisely what happened later that year. This second edition includes a completely rewritten chapter on the dramatic reversal by Azerbaijan with Turkish support of the gains made by Armenia in the first war two decades ago.