Armenia Navigates a Path Away From Russia

In a process that began in 2018 and accelerated in 2022, relations between Armenia and Russia have begun to break down. Formal institutional relations remain in place and high-level contacts continue. The economic relationship has become stronger since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, this cannot conceal the fact that the Armenian public’s confidence in Russia has collapsed and that the Armenian government, led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, is actively seeking to reduce its dependence on Russia. Pashinyan and Russian President Vladimir Putin have thus far refrained from personal criticism of one another, and when they meet they still—in public at least—speak the language of partnership. Other Russian officials are more blunt. Some Russian commentators have warned Armenia of the consequences of taking “unfriendly” steps toward Russia. Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin has blamed the West for trying to manipulate Armenia, stating “No kind of West can replace us.”¹

In the past two years, the Armenian government has made a series of highly symbolic yet not necessarily practical moves that reflect this shift. Armenia has frozen its participation in the Moscow-led military pact, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). On June 12, 2024, Pashinyan told parliament the country would leave the organization, but did not clarify how or when. Armenia has also accepted a European Union (EU)–led civilian border monitoring force, refusing a Russian proposal for the same. It has acceded to the International Criminal Court (meaning that in theory, Putin could be arrested if he sets foot on Armenian soil). Pashinyan has met publicly with two of Russia’s bêtes noires: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and exiled Belarusian leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Western officials have reciprocated. In March 2024, the European Parliament welcomed the idea of Armenia seeking candidate status for the European Union. On April 5, 2024, a high-level meeting in Brussels attended by Pashinyan, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, EU High Representative Josep Borrell, and U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a message of political support to Armenia. They also pledged extra financial assistance: the EU promised an additional 270 million euros over four years, and the United States an extra $65 million. That is on top of support for new infrastructure projects. In a June 2024 visit to Yerevan, assistant secretary of state James O’ Brien promised Armenia an enhanced strategic relationship.

There are questions over how much substance there is behind the messages of political support. Reacting to the April 5 meeting, opposition politician Levon Zurabyan commented: “We need simply to assess very soberly the capacity and desire of the West to help us.”²

The additional assistance announced in Brussels was still less than the amounts of aid provided to other Eastern European countries—and even to Armenia itself in previous years. In 2023, for example, the United States provided $87 million to Armenia, $135 million to Georgia, $265 million to Moldova, and $17 billion to Ukraine.³

Armenia’s neighbors, meanwhile, are broadcasting the message that the West is not seriously committed. Following the April 5 meeting in Brussels, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, and Türkiye issued almost identical statements deploring a “geopolitical confrontation” by the West, by which they meant new Western shows of support for Armenia. They have launched a regional “3+3” platform that seeks to enhance the role of regional players and reduce that of international actors and multilateral organizations—a project Armenia is reluctant to join.  

Reconsidering the Relationship

After achieving independence in 1991, Armenia aspired to have a “multi-vector” or “complementary” foreign policy, keeping good relations simultaneously with Russia, neighboring Iran, and Western countries.

In practice, successive Armenian governments, while maintaining friendly relations with Western countries, were heavily reliant for security, energy, and economic survival on Russia. This was primarily due to Armenia’s need for a security patron as it sought to defend the disputed Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the protracted conflict with Azerbaijan that began in the late Soviet era. A military alliance with Russia was formally agreed in 1996. The dependence increased in the Putin era when Armenia joined Russian-led military and economic organizations: the CSTO in 2002 and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in 2014.

The renewed outbreak of conflict with Azerbaijan in 2020—and Russia’s equivocal position on it—eroded the basis of the Russian-Armenian security compact. Moscow’s war against Ukraine in 2022 then drove Russia into a closer relationship with Azerbaijan, a near neighbor and close trading partner, to the detriment of Armenia. Armenian public indignation against Russia reached a new high in September 2023 when the Russian peacekeeping force charged with protecting the Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh did nothing to stop Azerbaijan taking over the region by force.

Between 2019 and 2023, according to an International Republican Institute poll, the number of Armenians who described the country’s relationship with Russia as “good” fell drastically, from 93 percent to 31 percent.⁴ France is now regarded by the Armenian public as the country’s most important political partner, with the United States in second place.

Those who have turned against Russia do so for different reasons. For some Armenians, it is all about security: they want their country to exchange one reliable patron (Russia) for another. For others, especially younger post-Soviet generations, alienation from Russia is more about values and an aspiration to join Europe; their views correspond more to similar pro-European social groups in Georgia.

Ties with Moscow go back a long way and some of them will endure, regardless of what the political elite decides. Large parts of the government bureaucracy, the military, and business still have connections to Russia. According to Russia’s 2020 census, 946,000 Armenians live in Russia, but many estimates, taking in migrant workers, are much larger: as high as 2.5 million. The Pashinyan government (most of whose members are in their thirties or forties) is creating new structures and betting on generational change by turning to more Western-oriented younger post-Soviet generations who no longer view Russia as a metropole and are less likely to speak fluent Russian or study in Russia. Most employees of the National Security Service, for example, received their training in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) academies. In 2023, Pashinyan created a new Foreign Intelligence Service headed by a forty-two-year-old female former human rights ombudsman, Kristine Grigoryan, in order to have a security agency independent of Russia. Similar efforts to dilute Russian influence in the armed forces are under way, but will need many years to take effect.

Russia, the Historic Patron

Security and pragmatic mutual interest have historically been at the heart of the Armenian-Russian relationship. Armenians served Russia and sought protection from it against the Ottoman Empire and Türkiye. When relations were at their best in the imperial and Soviet eras, Armenians were granted upward social mobility within the Russian elite. However, Russia’s size, power, and broader set of interests made for a sharp asymmetry in the relationship.

In the czarist era, writes the historian Ronald Suny, Armenians were characterized by three main images among Russians: “as Christian, as commercial, and as conspiratorial.” These stereotypes endured into modern times.⁵ The Christian connection was not doctrinal, as the Armenian Apostolic Church remained within the Oriental Orthodox branch of churches and was not in communion with Moscow, as for example the Georgian Orthodox Church was. Instead, the connection was based on shared political interests that dated back to the Russian conquest of the Transcaucasus (now known as the South Caucasus) in the early nineteenth century, when the czarist regime was looking for Christian allies against the Ottoman and Persian empires. They made the Armenian provinces a mainly loyal border zone and resettled thousands of Armenians from Persia in the process to repopulate the region.

The “commercial” stereotype stems from the fact that Armenians made up most of the merchant class in the Caucasus of the czarist era, in contrast to the more feudal structures among Georgians and Azerbaijanis (known mostly in that period as “Tatars”). Broadly speaking, this Armenian commercial class found favor with more liberal Russian regimes, but was distrusted by more conservative aristocratic classes, for whom—like the Jews—they were stereotyped as being an untrustworthy money-grabbing people.

At the end of the nineteenth century, this merchant class generated nationalist revolutionary movements, such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation or Dashnaktsutiun. This was the basis for the “conspiratorial” image of Armenians. In 1903, for the first time, the reactionary government of Nicholas II drove Armenians into open rebellion against the empire when it confiscated all Armenian church properties.

Soviet Armenia, formed by the Bolsheviks after Armenia was nearly overrun by Türkiye in 1920, was a generally loyal republic. For a small nationality, Armenians were overrepresented in the Soviet elite. Figures such as Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan and his brother Artyom, the famous aircraft designer, reached the highest levels of the establishment. Armenia was one of the most prosperous republics per capita of the USSR.

Russian perceptions of Armenians as “conspiratorial” resurfaced in 1988 when Armenians rebelled en masse against Moscow, demanding that Nagorno-Karabakh be transferred from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. Moscow rejected the Armenians’ main claim, while also reducing Azerbaijan’s control of the region. A dynamic developed in which Moscow steered between both sides in the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh and tried to instrumentalize the conflict to its own advantage.

Armenia’s two presidents of Karabakhi descent, Robert Kocharyan (1998–2008) and Serzh Sargsyan (2008–2018), forged closer economic and security links with Russia. Nevertheless, Sargsyan defied Russia at several symbolic moments: for example, he kept up fairly good relations with Georgia’s pro-Western president Mikheil Saakashvili (and presented him with Armenia’s highest medal) and promoted cooperation with NATO. However, it was also Sargsyan who took Armenia into the Russia-led EAEU in 2013, abandoning negotiations to sign an association agreement with the EU. Sargsyan made it clear that he did so under pressure from Moscow, because of security concerns.⁶

In 2018, a wave of peaceful protests known as Armenia’s Velvet Revolution forced Sargsyan to give up power. Russia did not intervene. Pashinyan, the new prime minister brought to power by the uprising, was of a younger generation (born in 1975) and came of age in the post-Soviet period. He had none of the personal or institutional links to Russia that his predecessors had had. A democratic populist, his first order of business was to strip power and wealth from Armenian business oligarchs, many of them associated with Russia. He did, however, initially recommit Armenia to the alliance with Moscow and membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the CSTO, and the EAEU.

Domestic Politics

In common with other Eastern European countries, Armenia’s politics is volatile and its political parties are personality-driven. Between 2018 and 2020, Pashinyan commanded unprecedented levels of popularity. After a series of crises and missteps by the government, as of 2024 Armenia has returned to the political dynamic it experienced before the Velvet Revolution of 2018. It again has, in the words of political scientist Alexander Iskandaryan, a “weak government and a weak opposition.”

The next parliamentary election is not due until 2026. As of July 2024, there are no signs of any other political party being able to defeat Pashinyan’s governing Civil Contract party. The prime minister’s relatively low approval rating (17 percent of respondents named him as a politician they trusted when given five names to choose from in a December 2023 IRI opinion poll,) still puts him well ahead of any other political figure in the country.

In public at least, and for now, Russia’s official policy toward Armenia differs from the one it pursues toward other countries—such as Moldova—in that it does not openly interfere in domestic politics. In Armenia, pro-Russian parties such as Prosperous Armenia have disappeared from the political scene. The Armenia Alliance party of former president Kocharyan, well known for his pro-Russia positions, has twenty-nine out of the 101 seats in parliament and is unlikely to improve on that standing in the next elections. In the 2023 IRI opinion poll, only 2 percent of respondents named Kocharyan as a politician they trusted.

Russian parliamentarian Konstantin Zatulin claimed that in 2021, the Armenian opposition (by which he presumably meant Kocharyan’s Armenia Alliance) had asked for Russian support in the parliamentary election but was refused it on the grounds that Moscow did not want to destabilize Pashinyan and the post-conflict settlement underpinned by the trilateral statement he had co-signed with his Azerbaijani and Russian counterparts to end the 2020 war.

More than half of Armenian respondents to the 2023 IRI poll said they did not trust any politician at all or feel an affinity with any political party. That leaves open the possibility for the same kind of rapid surge in support for a populist challenger analogous to Pashinyan himself, and is something that Russia could try to use to its advantage.

In May 2024, a new protest movement emerged very rapidly in the Tavush province of northern Armenia over the government’s decision to return four villages to Azerbaijan. A local bishop, Bagrat Galstanyan, called on Pashinyan to resign in rallies that attracted about 30,000 people at their height. On June 9, Galstanyan released a video in Russian, which seemed designed to attract support from within Russia.⁷

In what may be a sign of what is to come in Armenia’s next election in 2026, Russian state media—though not Russian officials—were supportive of the protests. Channel One ran both extensive news coverage of events in Armenia and a talk show critical of Pashinyan. In response, the Armenian government suspended Channel One’s license for three days, supposedly because of unpaid debts, but evidently because of the unfavorable coverage. Armenian sources close to the ruling party say it should prepare itself for the possibility of the Russian destabilization of the current government.⁸

Outsourcing Security

Armenia’s national security strategy has, since independence, been almost completely tied to its long-running conflict with Azerbaijan.

In 1996, Armenia and Russia signed a military alliance that was renewed and extended in 2010. Under it, Russia maintains an army base in the city of Gyumri through 2044, which was estimated in 2024 by a local military expert to comprise around 2,200 men—a reduction on much higher numbers a decade ago. Since 2002, Armenia has also been one of the six members of the Russia-led CSTO military alliance.

Russian border guards were deployed to Armenia in 1992, mainly on the country’s borders with Iran and Türkiye. Three years ago they were estimated to number 4,500 men. In May 2024, the Armenian and Russian leaders agreed that Russian border guards would be withdrawn from Yerevan’s Zvartnots International Airport and some border posts with Azerbaijan. 

In parallel, Putin’s Russia built an important if less formal security partnership with Azerbaijan. Between 2011 and 2020, Russia provided 94 percent of Armenia’s imports of major arms and 60 percent of Azerbaijan’s. (In absolute terms, the quantities delivered to Azerbaijan were greater; Armenia’s military alliance with Russia meant that it bought the weapons at a discount, while Azerbaijan paid the market price for them: an estimated $5 billion).⁹

Under Article 4 of the CSTO Treaty, analogous to NATO’s Article 5, member states are obligated to give each other “the necessary help, including military” in the event of foreign aggression. That did not help Armenia in 2020: Nagorno-Karabakh, as an internationally recognized part of Azerbaijan, was not covered by this provision.

Since the end of the 2020 war and especially since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, economic security has been a major priority for Russia in the South Caucasus. Because of its geography and infrastructure, this strategic focus has worked to the benefit of Azerbaijan and to the detriment of Armenia. Azerbaijan has echoed Russia’s insistence on the implementation of the last point of the trilateral ceasefire statement signed by all three countries in November 2020, which stipulates that Russian FSB border guards should be put in control of a reopened road and rail route that crosses Armenia to the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan, referred to by Azerbaijan as the “Zangezur Corridor.” Once built, this would facilitate Russia’s overland connections to Iran and the Persian Gulf.¹⁰

Armenia’s CSTO membership looks less important to Russia in this context. In September 2022, an inflection point occurred when Armenia tried to invoke Article 4 in the face of an Azerbaijani military incursion across the border into sovereign Armenian territory. The lack of a response from the CSTO triggered official complaints by Pashinyan that “Armenia’s membership in the CSTO has failed to contain Azerbaijani aggression.”¹¹ While Russia made equivocal comments about the operation, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko was openly supportive of Azerbaijan: Armenia’s relations with Belarus are now publicly breaking down in a way that Armenia has thus far avoided with Russia. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev asserted soon afterward that “The number of our friends in this organization is higher than those of Armenia.”

In 2024, Armenia froze its participation in the CSTO and stopped contributing to the budget. Though it had been a major supplier of weapons to Armenia only a few years before, Russia’s deliveries of arms dropped significantly and those that were promised were delayed in 2023. Armenia is now procuring weapons from France and India. According to sources in Yerevan, the delivery of a shipment of French armored vehicles was delayed in Georgia for several weeks before reaching Armenia in November 2023, indicating how Armenia’s geography and closed borders limit its options.¹² Armenia also hosted a (largely symbolic) training exercise with U.S special forces in September 2023. Of more significance was the deployment of the EU Mission in Armenia, a civilian border-monitoring mission now numbering more than 200 personnel, in southern Armenia against the objections of Azerbaijan—the first such EU Common Security and Defence Policy mission in a Russian-allied country.¹³ An effort to supply non-lethal security assistance to Armenia via the European Peace Facility was however reportedly vetoed by Hungary, which argued that equivalent aid should also be sent to Azerbaijan.¹⁴ The overall result is that Armenia is paying the price for years of outsourcing its security to Russia and is now in a hurry to build up relations with other partners—especially the West and India—in order to secure itself against potential further destabilization by Azerbaijan and Russia.

Economic Bonds

Russia is Armenia’s biggest trade partner. Since the war in Ukraine began in 2022, Armenia’s government has faced a dilemma: it wants to diversify the country’s economy over the longer term to ease its reliance on an ever more unpredictable Russia, even as in the short term the economic relationship with Russia has never been so favorable. Membership in the EAEU provides tariff-free trade with Moscow, for whom trading partners like Armenia that are not part of the Western sanctions regime have increased importance. Despite the many problems with Russia, 48 percent of respondents in the IRI survey said that Russia was Armenia’s most important economic partner (behind Iran, named by 49 percent, and ahead of Western countries).

Armenia’s GDP in 2024 is close to double what it was in 2021, having risen from $13.9 billion to $27 billion according to calculations by the International Monetary Fund.¹⁵ This is in large part due to increased trade volumes and reexports to Russia, which were worth more than $7.3 billion: a record number.¹⁶ An influx of professional migrants fleeing Russia since 2022 has also benefited the economy. Plenty of Armenians also still live in Russia, including many labor migrants. More than 85 percent of remittances sent to Armenia come from Russia. These numbers have fallen in the last two years.¹⁷

“Armenia cannot simply take Russia and throw it off and go in another direction,” said Gagik Makaryan, head of the Republican Union of Employers of Armenia, a business association.¹⁸ Makaryan noted that Russian state companies and individuals owned some of Armenia’s key assets, including its railways, gas pipeline, and major mining companies. This dates back to the Kocharyan presidency, when the Armenian government engaged in “debts for assets” deals with Moscow. Makaryan estimates that there are currently some 3,500 companies in Armenia under Russian ownership. They include the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine, Armenia’s biggest corporate taxpayer.

Armenia’s main exports—chiefly minerals, alcohol, and food products—are currently overwhelmingly aimed at the Russian market. Russia imports Armenian goods tariff-free thanks to EAEU membership; additionally, any rules are not rigorously applied and bribes can be paid to get around inspections.

By contrast, EU sanitary standards and certification are too exacting for most Armenian producers. Moreover, the EAEU prevents Armenia from signing trade pacts with other countries. That is why the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement which Armenia signed with the EU in 2017 and which came into force in 2021, lacks a trade component.

The sting in the tail is that the Russian government can and does take arbitrary decisions to stop Armenian exports for political reasons. Russia abruptly suspended Armenian dairy exports in March 2023 at a time of political tensions.¹⁹ On many occasions Armenian trucks crossing into Russia via the Upper Lars crossing point in the mountains of Georgia have been held up by Russian bureaucratic delays, as well as bad weather.²⁰ “They know where our weak spots are,” said Makaryan.

 Armenia is also very reliant on Russian imports, including vital food products. A 2024 World Bank report notes, “Russia accounted for 98 percent of Armenia’s imports of wheat, wheat flour, sunflower seed oil, and other cereals; almost 35 percent of all agrifood imports; and 39 percent of poultry in 2021. . . Russia also accounts for more than 50 percent of imports of bread, pasta, bulgur, and pastries (in value terms). In addition, Russia is Armenia’s primary source of fertilizers (38 percent in 2021), an input for domestic food production. Thus, ad hoc policy changes and supply disruptions from Russia can pose significant threats to Armenia’s food security.”²¹

Finally, Armenian dependence on Russia is very high when it comes to energy, and the country’s gas supply in particular. An International Energy Agency report from 2022 notes that 85 percent of Armenia’s gas is imported from Russia, and gas is also needed to power thermal plants: “Armenia therefore effectively relies on fuel imports from one country to produce nearly 70% of its electricity, raising concerns about the diversity of supply.”²²

There are currently few good alternatives to Russian gas. The gas pipeline to Armenia from Iran, the other chief source of gas, needs an upgrade in capacity in order to deliver higher volumes. Russia reportedly shut down the gas pipeline via Georgia to Armenia for two months in 2023 (though this was not advertised by the Armenian government) to show that it could punish Armenia if it wanted to.²³ The gas price is currently set at an advantageous $165 per thousand cubic meters, but Russia has the power to renegotiate the rate at short notice. There is a precedent for this: in April 2013, as Armenia was negotiating to sign an association agreement with the EU, Russia doubled the gas price. After Armenia decided to abandon the association agreement and agreed to join the EAEU instead, the price was reduced.²⁴

Russia is also the owner and operator of the Metsamor nuclear power station, which supplies one-third of Armenia’s electricity, at least until 2036, and supplies its uranium (by air). Sources in Yerevan say that Armenia is talking to South Korea and the United States about taking over the operation of the station from the Russians, but that Russia currently still has the strongest case for extending its management of Metsamor.²⁵

The Western response has been to try to make Armenia more resilient and self-sufficient by helping to build critical infrastructure and improve connections to the Black Sea. According to Western officials and international experts, these include the completion of a north-south highway across the country, plans to upgrade railway connections, and a commitment to connect Armenia to an EU-supported projected submarine high-voltage electricity cable under the Black Sea.²⁶

Geopolitics is crucial. Armenia will only be able to diversify its economy more fully when the land border with Türkiye, closed since 1993, reopens. Even with a closed border, Türkiye is Armenia’s fourth-largest trading partner, mainly via Georgia. Normalization efforts between the two countries are proceeding very slowly, however, as Türkiye coordinates with its close ally Azerbaijan. An agreement to open the border to third-country nationals was supposed to take effect in 2023 but has not been implemented.    

Key Takeaway: Wider Geopolitics Is Critical

Armenia finds itself in an uncertain geopolitical environment in 2024. Its relationship with Russia is increasingly fraught, but Armenia still depends on Russia heavily for energy and trade and remains its formal military ally. Public support for a diversification of foreign policy is strong and opinion polls show there is almost no endorsement for a return to pre-2020 security dependence on Russia. The West offers increased political and economic support, but mostly for the long term, and Western partners are years away from offering alignment with Western institutions. Armenia is looking to new partners outside the region, especially India, to diversify its set of international partners.

How this dynamic unfolds will to a large degree hinge on external events and choices made by Armenia’s neighbors. In the first place this means Azerbaijan, which remains much more powerful militarily and politically than Armenia and has shown willingness to use force on several occasions in the last few years; only if and when an Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement is signed will the threat of new conflict begin to recede. This is a weakness that Russia can continue to exploit. The course of the war in Ukraine will be another important determining factor: should Russia be more successful on the battlefield in 2024, it can be expected to take a tougher stance on its other neighbors, including Armenia. Developments in Georgia and Iran—which are shaped by these bigger trends too—will also be consequential for Armenia.

In the face of these challenges, the Pashinyan government is being criticized for having been rash in its defiance of Russia and promising too much to its people in terms of Western support. Arman Grigoryan—a former adviser to Armenia’s first post-independence president Levon Ter-Petrosyan—wrote: “A country like Armenia can ill afford to abandon an existing security architecture—and incur the almost certain hostility of a great power resulting from it—without alternatives. And such alternatives simply do not exist.”²⁷

Yerevan’s official response to criticism of this sort (more implied than direct) is that the “security architecture” Russia provides is unreliable, and that overreliance on a single security patron was a dangerous policy. In some of his most explicit remarks on this topic in September 2023, Pashinyan told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica: “Even if it wishes so, the Russian Federation cannot meet Armenia’s security needs. This example should demonstrate to us that dependence on just one partner in security matters is a strategic mistake.”²⁸

The West can offer less by way of security provision. Given the constraints of Armenia’s geography and its continuing institutional ties to Russia, the Western emphasis is on supporting a peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This is because decisions made by Azerbaijan and Türkiye will probably have the greatest impact on the degree to which Armenia continues to depend on Russia. Since 2020 there have been negotiations over an Armenia-Azerbaijan bilateral peace agreement that would potentially see a historic normalization of relations between the countries. Türkiye has made it clear that it is waiting for the green light from Baku to proceed with opening the closed land border and establishing diplomatic relations.

The outcome of this process will determine whether Armenia’s borders with these two countries open or remain closed. Should the normalization process fail, Armenia will remain isolated—and there is also the possibility of renewed conflict with Azerbaijan. A successful process would mean Armenia would have more options and would be able to lessen its historical dependence on Russia and pursue a stronger partnership with the West. A continuation of the status quo gives Russia more opportunities to reapply its traditional levers of control. 

Notes