Putin loses old ally to Trump’s new trade corridor

Moscow, however, has no intention of surrendering its influence quietly. As Armenians prepare to vote next month, Vladimir Putin has issued pointed warnings to Mr Pashinyan while reminding him of Russia’s enduring grip over much of the Armenian economy.

Armenian officials and Western diplomats also suspect the Kremlin is deploying more covert methods to shape the outcome of a pivotal election.

Russia guards its turf

In a pattern now familiar from elections across eastern Europe, distinguishing fact from fiction in Armenia has become increasingly difficult – something anyone who spends time on the country’s social media quickly discovers.

Post after post, often with links to apparently reputable Western news outlets, luridly details Mr Pashinyan’s invented misdeeds. The prime minister has supposedly trafficked children for sex, bought mansions in Canada and France and plans to flood Christian Armenia with Turkish mosques and French nuclear waste.

European officials also claim that “dark money” from Russia is being used to bribe voters and illegally finance pro-Moscow opposition parties. Last month, the European Union dispatched a “rapid response team” to Armenia to counter cyberattacks and what it described as state-backed disinformation.

Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesman, denied Moscow was attempting to manipulate the vote.

“Such an approach is foreign to Russia,” she said. “We have always respected and will continue to respect each nation’s sovereign choice.”

Whatever Moscow’s role in the online campaign, the Kremlin’s rhetoric towards Mr Pashinyan has grown increasingly menacing as Armenia deepens ties with the European Union, which it hopes one day to join.

On Monday, Putin warned that any move towards EU membership would mean the immediate loss of tariff-free trade and the preferential gas prices on which much of Armenia’s economy depends.

He also appeared to echo warnings from Russian state television that Armenia’s embrace of the West meant it risked suffering a Ukraine-style fate.

“We are now experiencing everything that is happening in the Ukrainian direction,” Putin said. “But where did it all begin? With Ukraine’s accession or attempts to join the EU.”

Competing corridors

Armenia’s political drift towards the West is troubling enough for Moscow. More alarming still is Mr Pashinyan’s “Crossroads of Peace” initiative – enthusiastically backed by Mr Trump – to transform Armenia from a landlocked frontier state into a regional transport hub.

For years the Kremlin has feared the emergence of a “Middle Corridor”, a transport route running through Central Asia and the South Caucasus that would allow Europe to bypass Russia when trading with China and the resource-rich states beyond the Caspian Sea.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, disruption to trade routes and intensifying competition for critical minerals have accelerated interest in alternative overland links between Europe and Asia.

China and the European Union are investing billions in railway construction, port expansion and energy infrastructure across the Middle Corridor.

Yet despite the investment, progress has repeatedly stalled – something European officials blame partly on Moscow’s success in reasserting influence in neighbouring Georgia.

Once regarded as the South Caucasus’s most democratic and pro-Western state, Georgia has drifted steadily back towards Russia under the ruling Georgian Dream party and its billionaire founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

One casualty has been the deep-water Black Sea port of Anaklia, envisioned as the principal maritime terminus of the Middle Corridor and the only Georgian port capable of handling the largest container vessels required to make the route commercially viable.

In its latest budget, the Georgian government cut funding for Anaklia by two-thirds, while planned expansions to existing ports have become mired in regulatory disputes and environmental reviews.

Critics accuse the government of deliberately slowing development to preserve Russia’s dominance over regional trade routes.

The resulting bottlenecks are so severe that exporters can often move goods more quickly and cheaply through Russia’s Northern Corridor, centred on the trans-Siberian railway.

Tripp-wire diplomacy

Until Trump’s intervention last year, isolated Armenia looked set to miss out on the Middle Corridor altogether. With its borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey sealed for decades after the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict erupted in the late 1980s, Armenia had largely been bypassed in plans for the trade route, which was expected instead to loop around the country’s northern frontier through Georgia.

Everything changed in 2023, when Azerbaijan saw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to retake Nagorno-Karabakh by force.

After a previous war in 2020, Russia had deployed peacekeepers to protect the territory’s ethnic Armenian population. But as the Ukraine conflict drained Moscow’s military resources, some of its most capable units were redeployed from the South Caucasus to the front.

When Azerbaijan launched its offensive, the remaining peacekeepers were ordered to stand aside – a decision many Armenians interpreted as both a sign of Moscow’s weakness and a deliberate attempt by Putin to punish Mr Pashinyan for his increasingly pro-Western orientation.

The Kremlin appears to have calculated that the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh would trigger Mr Pashinyan’s downfall and return Armenia to Russia’s orbit.

Instead, the Armenian leader weathered the crisis and accelerated his pivot Westward. Now standing for re-election, he is attempting to turn catastrophe into opportunity by normalising relations with both Azerbaijan and Turkey, despite Ankara’s continuing refusal to recognise formally the Armenian genocide.

That diplomatic breakthrough had long seemed impossible. Azerbaijan had for years demanded a sovereign land corridor through southern Armenia to its exclave of Nakhchivan – a proposal fiercely resisted by Yerevan, which feared losing control of its vital border with Iran.

The situation was complicated further by the 2020 ceasefire agreement, under which responsibility for securing the Armenia-Iran border was handed to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) spy agency, an arrangement viewed with deep suspicion in both Yerevan and Washington.

Here, unexpectedly, Mr Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy proved useful.

Seeking to break the deadlock, Washington proposed what diplomats described as a characteristically Trumpian solution: the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or Tripp.

Under the proposal, the corridor – a stretch of territory only 27 miles long – would remain sovereign Armenian land. But its development and security would be overseen by a US state-backed company operating under a 99-year lease.

Despite its modest size, Tripp’s strategic implications are significant.

For the EU, which quickly pledged £1.8bn towards the initiative, Tripp offers a major step towards strategic autonomy by creating a southern branch of the Middle Corridor that bypasses both Russia and an increasingly unreliable Georgia.

For Armenia, it represents both an economic lifeline and an exit ramp from Russian domination. As for Mr Trump, he has already earned nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize from both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Of all the peace agreements that Donald Trump has championed, this is the most promising,” says Thomas de Waal, a South Caucasus expert at Carnegie Europe, a think tank in Brussels.

Even Iran is perhaps more pragmatic than public rhetoric suggests. Although Tehran has publicly threatened military action against the project, officials in Yerevan believe Iran also recognises the commercial advantages of plugging into a lucrative trade route linking it to the Black Sea and Mediterranean.

Only Moscow is angry.

Losing the democratic sheen

Yet there seems little prospect of Russia wooing back its increasingly wayward southern neighbour.

Mr Pashinyan may no longer command the adoration that swept him to power during Armenia’s pro-democracy revolution in 2018. But analysts reckon his ruling Civil Contract Party – buoyed by promises of Western investment and integration – still retains enough support to secure victory next month.

The pro-Moscow opposition, by contrast, remains too divided and discredited to mount a serious challenge, however heavily the Kremlin throws its weight behind it.

“There is little likelihood of the Russian-oriented opposition winning,” says Laurence Broers of Chatham House, an international affairs think-tank.

“Rather than having a genuine horse in the race, Russia is pursuing a disruptive strategy aimed at sowing as much confusion as possible.”

Yet Mr Pashinyan’s democratic credentials are no longer as uncontested as they once were.

Armenia may have overtaken Georgia as the South Caucasus’s most democratic state, but even some allies acknowledge that power has become increasingly concentrated around him.

“It’s a highly personalised government and has been from day one, centred around this single charismatic individual,” says Mr de Waal. “And inevitably that begins to create problems. Increasingly we’re getting a lot of monologues from the prime minister without much dialogue.”

More than a dozen clergymen – including senior bishops – have been detained amid Mr Pashinyan’s escalating confrontation with the influential Armenian Apostolic Church.

Samwel Karapetyan, a prominent opponent of the prime minister, has been placed under house arrest. Police have been accused of using heavy-handed tactics against opposition demonstrations.

Critics accuse the European Union not merely of overlooking such abuses, but of interfering in Armenia’s election more openly than the Russians themselves.

“Russian interference, whatever it may be, pales into insignificance compared to EU interference,” says Robert Amsterdam, an American lawyer representing Mr Karapetyan.

“The EU has come here weeks before an election handing out money and appearing alongside Pashinyan at campaign-style events. Macron did everything other than give him a sainthood.

“The Europeans have sold their principles completely, ignoring the facts on the ground to engage in an all-out fight with Russia.”

Mr Pashinyan’s allies – backed by European diplomats – reject such criticism.

Russia’s influence over Armenian institutions, they argue, runs so deep that strict democratic niceties are a luxury the country cannot currently afford. Moscow has penetrated everything from the church to the security services, they say.

Given the threat of destabilisation, disinformation or even a military coup, the state has no choice but to mount an aggressive response that amounts less to authoritarianism than democratic self-defence.

“We want to be Switzerland,” one government official says. “But we are not Switzerland yet.”