Europe comes to Armenia but can solidarity replace a security guarantee? [ANAL

The European Political Community, Emmanuel Macron’s “anti-Putin” club for European political solidarity, created in the shock weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has come to the South Caucasus for the first time, to a country that still buys Russian gas, still hosts Russian troops and is still formally a member of Moscow’s economic bloc. Europe has not waited for Armenia to escape Russia’s orbit but has come to help pull it out. 

The catastrophe that changed everything 

But the EU’s toolkit – involving billions in investment, civilian missions and political endorsement – conspicuously excludes the two things Armenia most needs: a defense guarantee and an energy alternative to Russian gas. What happens in Armenia’s parliamentary election on June 7 will be the first verdict on whether that toolkit is enough. 

The EU’s calculation is to use this week to lock in Armenia’s westward turn through investment commitments, security missions and political endorsement before June’s parliamentary election gives Moscow one last chance to claw it back. 

To understand the significance of this week’s meeting, we need to know what happened in September 2023. Azerbaijan launched a military offensive to complete its takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed mountain territory that Armenia and Azerbaijan had fought over since the Soviet collapse. The offensive lasted less than 24 hours. More than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled within days and an entire population was displaced in a week. 

Russia had peacekeepers stationed there but they did nothing. Armenia was a member of the CSTO, Moscow’s answer to NATO, a collective security alliance that was supposed to assist its members if they came under attack. It also did nothing.  

Sargis Khandanyan, chairman of Armenia’s parliamentary foreign relations committee, described the moment: “We realized that the security architecture that we are in was not working.” 

Pashinyan froze Armenia’s participation in the CSTO in 2024 and began pursuing closer links with the EU.  

In March 2025, Armenia’s parliament passed a law formally launching the process of applying for EU membership. But Pashinyan has been careful to manage expectations: no formal application has yet been submitted, any accession would require a national referendum, and EU enlargement commissioner Marta Kos, while declaring in March that “Armenia and the EU have never been closer,” offered no timetable.  

On top of this, Armenia’s most immediate geographical problem, that its only viable land route to Europe runs through Georgia, whose own EU dialogue is frozen, remains unsolved.  

In August 2025, Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a peace declaration at the White House, with Donald Trump in the room, creating the basis for a settlement and for new transport corridors linking the region to European markets.

What Europe is offering and what it isn’t 

The EU’s package for Armenia is substantial until you notice what is absent from it. 

The EU has committed €2.5 billion in Global Gateway investment covering transport, energy and digital infrastructure, alongside a €270 million Resilience and Growth Plan running until 2027.  

This week’s summit launches an EU-Armenia Connectivity Partnership covering transport corridors, digital links and people-to-people contacts. A working arrangement between the EU border agency Frontex and Armenia’s interior ministry provides the first concrete step toward visa liberalization for Armenian citizens. 

The most significant element is the new EU Partnership Mission in Armenia, the EUPM, approved by the EU Council just two weeks ago.  

Twenty to thirty civilian experts will be deployed for two years, tasked with helping Armenia counter Russian cyber-attacks, disinformation operations and illicit financial flows.  

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas explained: “Armenians are facing massive disinformation campaigns and cyber-attacks. When Armenians go to the polls in June, they alone should choose their country’s future.” 

Brussels has run this model before. Ahead of Moldova’s elections last year, the EU deployed the same approach, involving civilian expertise, disinformation support and political solidarity. In that case, it worked, with Maria Sandu’s pro-EU party holding on to power.  

What is conspicuously absent from the package is what Armenia needs most: a defense guarantee and any near-term alternative to Russian gas. 

Moscow’s leverage 

Putin made the energy point himself when Pashinyan visited Moscow on April 1, just weeks before the summit. Russia sells Armenia gas at $177.50 per thousand cubic meters, he noted. In Europe, the equivalent costs $600. “The difference is large. It is significant,” Putin said. 

Russia’s pressure is economic and political rather than military. Days before the Yerevan summit opened, Russia banned imports of Armenian mineral water, a move whose timing was not accidental.  

Putin had also pressed Pashinyan to allow a detained Russian-Armenian billionaire, Samvel Karapetyan, to stand in the June elections.  

Artur Papyan, who monitors Armenia’s information space at CyberHUB-AM, reported that on a single morning before the summit he counted six or seven coordinated spikes in Telegram posts pushing the narrative that hosting the summits represents Armenia’s point of no return and that Russia will respond accordingly. 

Armenia still hosts a Russian military base in Gyumri. It remains a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Russian-led trade bloc that Putin has already warned is fundamentally incompatible with EU membership. “It is simply impossible by definition,” he told Pashinyan in April.  

The election that decides everything 

On June 7, Armenians vote in what is effectively a referendum on the country’s strategic direction. Pashinyan has made the European course the central argument of his campaign, framing the choice explicitly as Europe or a return to Russian dependency.  

Opposition parties contest that framing, pointing to domestic failures on corruption and the economy. But the foreign‑policy question dominates, and both Brussels and Moscow know it. 

Six Armenian opposition parties have written an open letter to the summit’s attending leaders, arguing that by hosting a parade of European heads of government in Yerevan five weeks before a general election, Brussels is effectively throwing its weight behind Pashinyan’s re-election campaign.  

The charge has some validity, as the EU clearly wants Pashinyan to win. A pro-Russian reversal after the investment of political capital, civilian missions and billions in pledged funding would be a serious strategic setback for everyone who flew in this week. 

European Council President António Costa, who co-chaired the summit alongside Pashinyan, said this week that Armenia now sits “in the heart of Europe.”  

The phrase captures an aspiration rather than a reality. Armenia remains landlocked between Russia, Iran and Turkey, with a peace process with Azerbaijan that is real but unfinished.  

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