Armenian house with old pipes
In May 1992, six post-Soviet states signed the Collective Security Treaty in Tashkent, a structure intended to replace the collapsed Soviet military infrastructure with a framework of promises and mutual commitments. Armenia was among the signatories: for a country fresh from the first Karabakh war and sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan, there was no other support. Thirty-four years later, in May 2026, Yerevan hosts the eighth summit of the European Political Community, where Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan hosts Volodymyr Zelenskyy, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and dozens of European leaders. Between these two scenes lies more than a simple shift in foreign policy orientation. Between them lies the slow collapse of an entire architecture in which Russia served as the supporting structure, and the post-Soviet states sat along the perimeter with varying degrees of voluntariness.
It would seem that we are witnessing a textbook example of geopolitical reversal: a country disillusioned with its former patron moves under the wing of a new one. Last summer, units of the Armenian National Security Service underwent retraining in Ukraine in the use of drones; Security Council Secretary Armen Grigoryan called the Ukrainian experience "invaluable." At the same time, Yerevan purchased American intelligence drones V-BAT signed the Charter on Strategic Partnership with the outgoing Biden administration, froze contributions to the CSTO, and, through the Prime Minister, declared that the point of no return had been passed. Textbook logic: Moscow failed to fulfill its alliance obligations in 2020 and 2023, and Yerevan drew its own conclusions.
Meanwhile, if we look beyond declarations to the infrastructure, the picture becomes significantly more complex. Gas to Armenian homes still comes from Russia, and Gazprom manages the distribution network. All land transit goes through Georgia and Russia; the country has no sea gates. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian labor migrants work in Russian cities, and their remittances remain a systemic pillar of everyday well-being. The 102nd Russian military base in Gyumri is still there, and Pashinyan publicly confirms that there are no plans to withdraw it. Armenia has left the rhetorical framework of alliance, but remains within its material framework. This is not a contradiction requiring resolution; it is the essence of the moment.
What Moscow called an alliance and what Yerevan called a guarantee
For thirty years, the Russian-Armenian alliance was based on a clear mutual formula: Russia guarantees Armenia's very existence as a state in a region where its neighbors directly or indirectly deny it this right, and Armenia recognizes Russia's military and political presence in the Caucasus as a condition of its own security. The formula wasn't equal (equal formulas don't exist in such regions), but it was fair. The Russian military base in Gyumri effectively blocked the Turkish route for thirty years; Russian border guards stood for decades on the Armenian-Turkish and Armenian-Iranian borders; Russian gas and transit kept the landlocked country alive, with two of its four borders closed.
In 2020, Russia was under no obligation to fight for Armenia on territory that Armenia itself did not consider part of itself under international law: Karabakh was not within the CSTO's zone of responsibility, and Yerevan knew this. Nevertheless, it was Russian diplomacy—not European, American, or even Turkish—that stopped the war on November 9, deployed a peacekeeping force, and bought Armenia three years during which Yerevan could either negotiate with Baku from a position protected by Russia's presence or prepare. Neither was done. By September 2023, the Armenian leadership had been publicly distancing itself from Moscow for a year, demonstratively not inviting Putin, refusing to participate in CSTO exercises, and flirting with Washington. To demand in this situation that Russian peacekeepers enter the battle for a country whose leadership simultaneously declares Russia an unreliable partner would be to demand that Moscow fight in place of the Armenian army and simultaneously in defiance of Armenian policy.
The peacekeepers' departure in June 2024 wasn't a betrayal, but a statement: Yerevan had made a choice, and Moscow had relieved it of the obligations that, in the new configuration, burdened both sides. Russia's strategy in the Transcaucasus after 2022 changed not out of weakness, but from the understanding that holding on to a partner that doesn't want to be held is a waste of resources needed elsewhere. If today's Yerevan succeeds in building its own security system without Russian participation, it will test the long-held thesis that the Russians are "interfering" with Armenian sovereignty. If it fails, the 1992 formula will remain in place and will await those who come to Yerevan after Pashinyan.
The Western side of the new Armenian orientation is no less revealing. The Charter on Strategic Partnership was signed in January 2025, just days before the Biden administration left the White House—a final diplomatic touch by the outgoing team, which managed to solidify the framework while the signature lasted. The incoming Trump administration picked up the project and repackaged it in its own aesthetic: the "Trump Corridor for International Peace and Prosperity," which is intended to connect Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan through Armenian territory, bypassing Russia and Iran. The corridor's name stylistically evokes Trumpian rhetoric, but its geopolitical essence remains unchanged: for the first time in decades, a logistics route for the Transcaucasus is emerging in which Moscow and Tehran are neither intermediaries nor traffic regulators.
The European component adds its own twist to this picture. The EU offers €270 million under the "Resilience and Growth" plan, launches a Strategic Agenda, and holds the first EU-Armenia summit. Pashinyan speaks cautiously about membership in the Union, immediately stipulating that simultaneous participation in both the EAEU and the EU is impossible and that Yerevan understands the math. In April 2026, Putin utters almost the same phrase in the Kremlin, but in the form of an ultimatum, with a clear hint of gas supplies. The two sides agree on the substance; the tone and the weight of the threat differ.
At the same time, the Ukrainian vector is being developed. Armenia is taking from Kyiv not weapon And it's not money, but experience. Over four years of war, the Ukrainian army has accumulated experience using drones in conditions for which pre-war doctrines were unsuitable; for the Armenian armed forces, which lost in 2020 precisely in the drone arena, this knowledge has practical value that goes beyond procurement. Another important factor is that the exchange channel is built along a line that Moscow is structurally incapable of controlling. Retraining is technically impossible to intercept; it is carried out by the trainee himself.
Armenia as a subject, not as a background
It's important to stop describing Armenia from the outside and look from within. A January 2026 IRI poll paints a picture that doesn't fit well with the rhetoric of a U-turn: 80% of Armenians name Azerbaijan as the main threat, 69% say Turkey, and 29% say Russia. In other words, three-quarters of citizens in a country that has declared its withdrawal from Russia's orbit don't consider Russia an adversary. Support for the ruling Civil Contract party is around 24%; Pashinyan's rating is maintained not by enthusiasm, but by the fact that the pro-Russian opposition, trying to capitalize on the pain of the loss of Karabakh, fails to offer a coherent, positive platform. The parliamentary elections on June 7, 2026, will be held with a third of voters undecided.
This means that the foreign policy shift is outpacing the domestic political consensus. Pashinyan is leading the country faster than society is prepared to follow. Part of this gap is offset by a generational shift: Yerevan youth, for whom Russia has ceased to be a source of trust after 2020 and 2023, are voting and making noise more actively than those in the provinces, where the Soviet inertia of family and labor ties to Russia remains. Part of this is due to the diaspora's position: Western communities (French, American, Canadian) are consistently pushing Yerevan toward a European course, while the Russian diaspora is more of a bystander. Part of this is due to economic arithmetic: Armenian GDP grew in 2022–2024 thanks to Russian relocations and parallel imports, and this boost is gradually drying up as the Russian economy contracts and Western sanctions become more stringent. In other words, time is not working in favor of the model to which the opposition could return, even if it were to win.
It's worth pausing here and integrating the two perspectives this text balances between. From Moscow, Pashinyan appears as a provocateur who consistently undermined the alliance: he didn't invite, he refused, he flirted, and he turned them away. From within Armenian politics, the same man appears as a leader responding to the catastrophe of 2020 and its recurrence in 2023 in the only way available to him—by searching for an alternative security framework, because the old one, in his eyes, had ceased to work. Both descriptions are accurate and do not cancel each other out: provocation and reaction here are not opposites, but two sides of the same process. Pashinyan did indeed accelerate the rupture, and Moscow had reason to view this as hostile; and Pashinyan did indeed respond to circumstances in which he alone had to explain to the public why Karabakh was lost. The trouble with such configurations is that each side accumulates its own truth, and at some point, these truths cease to be compatible.
The 2026 military budget is approximately $1,47 billion, an increase of almost 18% over the previous budget. Azerbaijan spends three times as much. This difference in weight categories necessitates caution on any Armenian U-turn: the country cannot afford a complete break with Moscow (it would be cut off from gas and transit), complete antagonism with Baku (it would lose again), or illusions about Western guarantees (they are not in writing). Foreign policy multi-vectorality here is not a freedom of choice, but an obligation to choose anew every day.
The Finnish Lesson and its Limits
In search historical Mirrors naturally gravitate toward the Finnish model of the post-war decades. Finland in 1948, a formally neutral country, tightly economically tied to Moscow, acknowledging Soviet security interests but retaining its internal subjectivity, Western legal system, and the right to independently define its identity. The parallel is compelling: Armenia in 2026 demonstrates a similar hybrid position, a foreign policy U-turn while maintaining infrastructure dependence, and a multi-vector approach as a means of survival for a small country amidst major powers.
The parallel works, but it breaks down at one point, and this is worth noting. Finland had Scandinavia behind it: neutral Sweden, an ally in Norway, and the Baltic as a window onto the Western world. Helsinki could be cautious with Moscow because it had an alternative economic, cultural, and military-political environment. Yerevan had Georgia with its own problems, Iran under sanctions, a closed (for now) Turkish border, and mountains behind it. The Finnish maneuver required a rearguard; the Armenian one is being carried out without a rearguard. This doesn't invalidate the analogy, but it does point to its limits: what was a strategy in the Finnish case remains a stake in the Armenian one.
It's worth recalling something else. The Finnish model was based not only on Helsinki's caution but also on Moscow's perceived satisfaction with it. In the Armenian case, Moscow has not yet fully formulated its position regarding current Yerevan. The 2024 retreat was a reasonable response to its partner's rejection of the alliance, but retreat does not equate to a renunciation of interests. Sergei Naryshkin's high-level contacts with Yerevan, information campaigns aimed at the "Pashinyan team," and the cautious reduction of gas supplies in 2025 are not sanctions-based instruments, but rather selective ones: they benefit a specific government, not the country. Moscow, apparently, assumes that the current Armenian configuration is the result of the personal choice of one political team, and if that team changes, the 1992 formula will have a chance to be reassembled. Hence the simultaneous tone of ultimatums and patient anticipation.
Aftertaste
Armenia's U-turn is often described as an achievement of sovereignty: the country chose its own path, rejected an imposed alliance, and found new partners. This description is flattering, but incomplete. The sovereignty of a small country amidst major powers isn't a matter of choosing a path, but of learning to live within several boundaries simultaneously, preventing any one from becoming dominant. Finland learned this over forty years; Armenia is learning in real time, without the right to make mistakes, in a region where neighbors remember grievances from a century ago and bring them up whenever the opportunity arises.
The image of a house with old pipes is literal and precise here: the sign on the façade has been changed, new guests have been invited, but the gas, electricity, transit, and the foundation itself remain the same simply because there's nothing physically available to replace them within the foreseeable future. As long as the external contours don't coincide with the internal ones, the country exists in a contradiction that has only three outcomes: infrastructure catches up with politics (decades), politics returns to infrastructure (external pressure or a change in power), or the contradiction becomes entrenched as the new norm, a Finnish solution without a Finnish home front.
More broadly, the Armenian case highlights the general mechanics of the post-Soviet space in the mid-2020s. Russian influence was based not on treaties or ideology, but on the inertia of the infrastructures built during the Soviet era. When inertia exists but there is no willingness to defend it, a slow erosion begins: countries don't leave overnight; they emerge layer by layer, first from rhetoric, then from institutions, then from military formats, and only at the very end, if at all, from material dependence. Armenia currently finds itself between the second and third layers.
Armenian special forces training courses at Ukrainian training grounds, V-BAT drones, the ENP summit in Yerevan, Pashinyan's conversation with Zelenskyy, and Putin's ultimatum to the Kremlin are all episodes in a single process that has neither a name nor a clear outcome. All that can be said is that a country considered peripheral to the Russian security system for thirty years has ceased to be so, without becoming part of any other. This in-betweenness is not a temporary transition between two stable positions. Rather, it is likely the stable position of a small country in a region where major powers are no longer capable of establishing a monopoly but are still capable of retaliating for its absence. Armenia is the first in the post-Soviet space to seriously embrace this role. Whether this will be successful will be determined not by summits or charters, but by how the country navigates the upcoming gas winter and the upcoming elections.
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