Humiliated by Azerbaijan, Armenia tacks towards the West
The European Union boasts of being a regulatory superpower, not a military one. But in its relationship with Armenia it is starting to deploy both sorts of muscle. On July 22nd the EU announced that one of its military-assistance programmes will send aid to Armenia for the first time. The same day it opened visa-liberalisation talks. Meanwhile, American troops were conducting a small exercise with Armenian forces. It was all part of the pivot to the West begun last year by Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister.
Armenians are disillusioned with their erstwhile patron, Russia. Distracted by its war in Ukraine, it failed in 2023 to stop Azerbaijan from conquering Nagorno-Karabakh, formerly an autonomous ethnically Armenian enclave. Both America and European powers are eager to weaken Russia in its traditional backyard. “Much of the population of Armenia wants to get further from Russia. So we’re creating the conditions for that to happen,” said James O’Brien, America’s assistant secretary of state for Europe, on July 30th. But it is a difficult manoeuvre, and Mr Pashinyan is buffeted by winds from multiple directions.
In the Caucasus, Russia is down but not out. Mr Pashinyan has frozen military co-operation and evicted Russian border guards who were stationed at Yerevan’s airport. But Russia still has a base and thousands of soldiers in Armenia, and its border guards still patrol Armenia’s frontiers with Turkey and Iran. Russia owns Armenia’s railways and fuels its nuclear power plant. It probably still enjoys the sympathy of many in the security forces.
The Russian response to Armenia’s westward turn has ranged from concern trolling (Maria Zakharova, a foreign-ministry spokeswoman, expressed “concern for Armenia’s future”) to veiled threats. Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said Armenia was free to pursue relations with other partners but not “the way the Kyiv regime did it, that is, in an ‘either-or’ fashion”.
Meanwhile, Mr Pashinyan is negotiating with Azerbaijan to resolve their decades-long conflict. Azerbaijan is using the threat of fighting to strong-arm Armenia into concessions, including removing territorial claims on Nagorno-Karabakh from its constitution. At home Mr Pashinyan faces an emboldened opposition, led by a charismatic nationalist archbishop, that is enraged by such compromises.
If the Kremlin wants trouble for Armenia, Azerbaijan will be happy to help. On July 26th it claimed that Armenia had fired heavy weapons across the border, blaming America, the EU and France for encouraging “provocations”. With Western military aid, Armenia is “less motivated to stay engaged in the peace process”, says Elchin Amirbayov, a senior Azerbaijani official.
Western help has so far been modest. The EU’s military aid amounts to €10m ($10.8m), partly earmarked for preparing Armenian forces to take part in future EU missions. The joint drills with American forces were based on a peacekeeping scenario, not combat. If the visa-liberalisation talks eventually bear fruit, it will be years from now. None of this helps with Armenia’s immediate needs. “The West most probably will not give hard security guarantees to Armenia, and I believe everyone understands this—Russia, the West, Pashinyan and Azerbaijan,” says Benyamin Poghosyan of APRI Armenia, a think-tank.
The extent of the pivot to the West remains unclear. It will probably depend on the outcome of the war in Ukraine and on whether Russia’s relations with the West remain bitter. In the meantime, Mr Poghosyan says, Mr Pashinyan is trying to be “anti-Russian enough to get something from the West and not anti-Russian enough to burn all the bridges with the Kremlin”. ■
To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.