BAKU — Azerbaijani officials acknowledged Wednesday that more than 14,000 Iranian citizens, the overwhelming majority ethnic Azeris from the provinces of East Azerbaijan and Ardabil, had crossed into the country through the Astara land border over the past three weeks, a figure that for the first time placed the Caucasus on the public ledger of the war’s civilian fallout and intensified scrutiny of the careful balancing act being performed in Baku, Yerevan and Tbilisi.

The disclosure, made by State Border Service spokesman Shahin Ismayilov at a midday briefing, came as President Ilham Aliyev convened an unusual joint session of his national security council and the parliamentary defense committee to review what officials described as a “deterioration of the threat picture” along Azerbaijan’s 765-kilometer frontier with Iran. Two cruise missile fragments recovered last week in the Bilasuvar district, identified by Azerbaijani investigators as components of an Iranian-manufactured Paveh-class system, have so far been treated as off-course debris rather than as a deliberate act, but the incident has hardened a debate inside the government over whether the country’s longstanding security cooperation with Israel can continue to be conducted as quietly as it has been.

“Azerbaijan is not a party to this war and will not become one,” Aliyev told the closed session, according to a readout released by the presidential press service. “But we are not naive about geography. The decisions we make in this period must protect our sovereignty, our citizens and our economy without inviting consequences that no Caucasus state could absorb.”

The remarks, unusually candid for a leader who has typically said little about Israeli-Iranian tensions, reflected a recognition in Baku that the country’s posture had become harder to sustain on autopilot. Azerbaijan supplies roughly 40 percent of Israel’s crude imports through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and has long been one of the most important purchasers of Israeli military technology, including the Harop loitering munitions whose deployment in the war’s opening weeks Iranian state television has repeatedly attributed to Caspian-route transfers — claims Baku has dismissed as “fabrications designed to manufacture a pretext.”

Inside Iran, those claims have nonetheless given political cover to elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that have for years pushed for a tougher line against what they describe as Azerbaijani facilitation of Israeli operations. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei warned on Monday that “the patience of the Islamic Republic with the activities of the Zionist regime in our northern neighbor is not unlimited,” wording Azerbaijani diplomats characterized as deliberately ambiguous.

For Armenia, whose 44-kilometer border with Iran has become a small but symbolically important corridor, the war has presented a different set of dilemmas. Yerevan has long viewed Tehran as a strategic counterweight to Azerbaijan and Turkey, and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government has been careful not to be drawn into any Western-led pressure campaign. Armenian customs officials said cross-border commercial traffic through the Agarak crossing had nearly doubled since mid-March as Iranian importers sought alternative routes for medical and consumer goods that previously transited through the Persian Gulf.

“Armenia’s relationship with Iran has always been pragmatic, and in this period it is becoming indispensable in a quiet way,” said Tatevik Sargsyan, a foreign policy analyst at the Regional Studies Center in Yerevan. “Pashinyan has no interest in being conspicuous. The goal is to keep the corridor functioning, avoid any appearance of sanctions-busting that would invite American or European questions, and quietly accumulate goodwill that may become useful when the post-war map is drawn.”

Georgia, the third Caucasus state and the only one without a direct Iranian border, has nonetheless found itself drawn into the story by virtue of its role as the principal transit hub for Iranian dual nationals reaching Europe and as the terminus of the BTC pipeline. Georgian Foreign Minister Maka Bochorishvili told reporters in Tbilisi on Tuesday that the country had received “a noticeable but manageable” uptick in third-country nationals transiting from Baku to Tbilisi International Airport, and that consultations with European partners on visa-processing capacity had intensified.

European officials, for their part, have begun to treat the Caucasus as a quiet test case for whether the war’s consequences can be absorbed without producing new instability in regions that already carry unresolved disputes. A European External Action Service delegation that visited Baku and Yerevan last week pressed both governments to maintain their existing borders, refrain from any provocative deployments and continue accepting humanitarian crossings, according to two diplomats familiar with the meetings. The delegation also raised, in Baku, the question of whether the volume of Israel-bound crude moving through the BTC could be modestly reduced as a “signaling measure” — a suggestion Azerbaijani officials politely declined to take up.

Inside the Azerbaijani parliament, a small but growing bloc of legislators has begun pushing for a public review of the country’s defense and intelligence cooperation with Israel, framing the issue not as a question of loyalties but as one of risk management. “We did not build this partnership in order to expose our cities to missile debris,” said Faiq Aliyev, a member of the defense committee and no relation to the president. “It is time to ask what we are getting for what we are accepting.” Officials said a closed-door briefing on the country’s air-defense posture was scheduled for later this week, with additional consultations expected to follow.