Listen to What Vladimir Putin Is Saying About Armenia

May 19, 2026
By: Joseph Epstein

Putin and other Kremlin insiders are threatening a hybrid warfare campaign to bring down Armenian leader Nikol Pashinyan. The Trump administration should back him up.

For years before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders reassured themselves that longtime Russian President Vladimir Putin was merely posturing. The consensus held that Russia’s all-out propaganda blitz—talking heads on state TV denying Ukrainian sovereignty, calls for referendums in the east, and warnings of Euro-Atlantic encroachment—was empty political posturing and was not meant literally. Even weeks before the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, now rightly remembered as a stalwart hero of Ukraine’s defense, insisted that Russia’s threats to invade were mere rhetoric. Until they were not.

The same vocabulary is now being aimed at Armenia, and last week, Putin took it on himself. Days after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explicitly announced that Armenia was not Russia’s ally in the war on Ukraine, Putin warned that the country is “now living through everything that is happening on the Ukrainian track”—a path that began with Ukraine’s move toward the EU and ended in “the coup d’état, the Crimea story, the position of southeastern Ukraine, and military actions.” As an alternative, Putin proposed an overt referendum on whether Armenia should break with Russia, followed by “a soft, civilized, and mutually beneficial separation.”

The threat behind Putin’s words could not have been clearer. Even so, others within his orbit went a step further. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova alleged that Yerevan had been drawn into an “anti-Russian orbit” by the European Union—the same framing of Euro-Atlantic encroachment into the historical Russian sphere of influence that the Kremlin used to justify its war on Ukraine. Not to be outdone, Russian state propagandist Vladimir Solovyov argued for Russia to expand its “special military operation” into Armenia.

What Is Russia Planning in the Caucasus?

The South Caucasus was, until recently, Moscow’s domain. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 to punish Tbilisi’s Western pivot. To the south, the Kremlin played off Armenia and Azerbaijan against one another—guaranteeing Armenia’s security while selling weapons to Azerbaijan—in order to keep the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict frozen, and thereby maintain its regional indispensability. That arrangement collapsed in late 2020, when Azerbaijan retook most of Nagorno-Karabakh after a six-week war, and again in 2022, when Moscow tied up its capacity in Ukraine. After Azerbaijan retook Nagorno-Karabakh in its entirety in 2023, a regional detente set in, and both Yerevan and Baku began turning to other mediators. The August 8, 2025 peace summit—which placed Washington at the center of the South Caucasus for the first time — was the final blow to a Russian position already in retreat, and the foundation of an American one.

This is Washington’s problem. The ongoing situation in Armenia is the first stress test of a major, though under-celebrated, achievement of President Donald Trump’s second administration. The Armenia–Azerbaijan peace deal put the United States in operational control of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) corridor spanning the two countries, benefiting both and significantly improving the US position in the South Caucasus. If the Kremlin engineers a change of government in Yerevan by whipping up hardline anti-Azerbaijan sentiment in Armenia, the deal goes back on the table, and so does America’s foothold.

The Middle Corridor—the trade route connecting Europe to Central Asia—is the only major commercial artery that bypasses Russia, China, and Iran simultaneously. That matters because Central Asia holds some of the world’s largest untapped reserves of rare earths. The United States currently depends on China for roughly 70 percent of its rare earth supply, a dependency Beijing has already weaponized in trade disputes. Lose Yerevan, and TRIPP shuts down.
A Russian invasion of Armenia at this stage is highly improbable. Russian forces are tied down in Ukraine. Moreover, Russia and Armenia do not border each other: in order to reach Armenia, Russian forces would need to pass through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, or Iran, each posing its own military or political problem.

What is more likely—and in fact already underway—is an intensified hybrid campaign to bring down Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and reinstall a Kremlin-aligned government in Yerevan. The Kremlin’s opening is the June 7 parliamentary election. Pashinyan’s principal challenger is the political vehicle of Samvel Karapetyan—a Russian-Armenian billionaire enriched by Russian state contracts who has lobbied for closer ties with Moscow, railed against the peace deal, and is now under house arrest on charges of plotting a coup.

How America Can Stop a Russian Takeover in Armenia

Fortunately, the United States has a major asset in the fight against Russia for influence in Armenia: the Armenian people themselves. The Armenians have not forgiven Russia for standing aside as Azerbaijan retook Nagorno-Karabakh, and they remember that every leader since independence except Levon Ter-Petrosyan governed in Moscow’s pocket. The demand for a Western pivot is real.

Washington has tools to make that pivot durable. The United States can build out a strategic transit partnership centered on TRIPP and support Armenia’s nascent AI and technology sector. Each prospective investment or partnership does double duty: economic upside for Armenians, geopolitical insulation against Moscow.

Washington also has tools against the Kremlin’s preferred candidate. Executive Order 14024 authorizes the Treasury Department to sanction individuals who “undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad” for the benefit of the Russian government. The same authority was used against Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party. Karapetyan fits the same description: a Russian-state-contracts billionaire campaigning for closer ties to Moscow.

The strangest piece of this puzzle sits in Washington itself, where the Armenian-American diaspora organizations that should be the strongest advocates for a US–Armenia partnership are working against it. The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), the Armenian diaspora’s main lobbying organization in the United States, has remained generally bipartisan for most of its existence, recognizing that a strong US-Armenia relationship cannot be maintained in the long run if the movement aligns openly with one political party. Yet ANCA policy director Alex Galitsky recently accused Trump of “genocidal ethnic cleansing of [Nagorno-Karabakh],” “genocide in Palestine,” and “threaten[ing] genocide against Iran”—language that aligns the organization with the American far left and amplifies Iranian-aligned talking points. ANCA has also organized legislators to undermine the peace deal, including Senator Adam Schiff, and amplified Robert Amsterdam, a Kremlin-aligned lobbyist who represents Vadim Novinsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who fronted Moscow’s effort to weaponize a breakaway Orthodox faction against Kyiv on charges of “Christian persecution.” Amsterdam has appeared with Karapetyan’s nephew on right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson’s program to recast Karapetyan as a defender of Christianity persecuted by his own government. The Kremlin is using the same playbook it used against Ukraine—talking out of both sides of its mouth to different fringe audiences—with a new target in mind.

Pashinyan is not a perfect leader. Yet for all his various faults, he is attempting to take Armenia out from under Moscow’s thumb. He deserves America’s support, and the diaspora organizations running interference for the Kremlin must be treated as exactly that.

The West’s mistake on Ukraine was not ignorance, but disbelief. For years, Moscow shouted what it thought of Kyiv’s drift westward, and Western capitals minimized the rhetoric. Armenia now sits at the edge of the same pattern. The language is intimately familiar to anyone who listens, and the pressure campaign is already underway. The date is June 7. Washington has time to lock in the gains of the peace deal and anchor the South Caucasus in a Western orbit—but only if it understands that when the Kremlin repeats itself, it means it.

About the Author: Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in various outlets such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.

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