Rubio Armenia Visit Highlights Western Turn—One Step Remains | Opinion

Former Armenian Diplomat

Armenia’s parliamentary election on June 7 will be seen as a referendum on the country’s extraordinary geopolitical gamble. Armenia’s emerging Western orientation should not be viewed as a political property of any single leader but as a shift away from strategic overdependence on Moscow toward broader partnership with Europe and the United States, reflecting a collective national reassessment.

The strategy has already produced visible results. The May 4 European Union summit in Armenia reflected the country’s growing importance to Europe and Washington as a potential democratic and logistical bridge in the South Caucasus. This week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Yerevan to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Armenia, alongside additional accords on critical minerals and cooperation surrounding a proposed transit corridor through southern Armenia linking Azerbaijan with its exclave of Nakhchivan and onward to Turkey.

The agreements underscored how central the South Caucasus has suddenly become to Western strategic thinking as Europe and the United States seek new trade, energy, and logistical routes that bypass both Russia and Iran.

So Armenia has diversified its partnerships, deepened ties with Europe, hosted Western leaders, and reduced its reliance on Russia. A country long viewed as isolated and vulnerable has started to look outward with a degree of confidence unseen in a generation.

Yet, this transformation rests on an enormous and painful sacrifice.

The price of Armenia’s geopolitical repositioning was effectively the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh, the mountainous enclave that for decades functioned as a de facto Armenian state after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Following Azerbaijan’s military assault in September 2023, the enclave, which also endured a nine-month blockade, collapsed entirely. More than 120,000 ethnic Armenians fled almost overnight into Armenia itself, fearing persecution, imprisonment, or worse under Azerbaijani rule. One of the oldest Armenian communities in the world vanished from the territory in a matter of days.

For many Armenians, the trauma remains raw and unresolved because the world moved on with startling speed. International outrage faded quickly, with attention shifting to the Middle East after the October 7 assault by Hamas on Israel, and the devastating wars that followed.

In the South Caucasus itself, diplomatic energy and attention shifted toward infrastructure deals and regional normalization. The refugees settled in Armenia, carrying stories of abandoned homes, left behind cemeteries, emptied churches, and a collective identity uprooted from its historic center. They received sympathy but little justice, no meaningful compensation, and no credible path toward return.

At the center of this unresolved tragedy sits another issue that increasingly threatens to poison Armenia’s rapprochement with Azerbaijan and its wider Western integration: the continued imprisonment in Azerbaijan of several dozen former Artsakh officials and public figures, including Ruben Vardanyan, the former state minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, who was convicted earlier this year and sentenced to 20 years in Azerbaijani prison.

Their detention has become one of the defining moral questions of the postwar order in the Caucasus. Azerbaijan presents them as criminals. Armenians view them as political prisoners abandoned in the rush toward normalization. Their fate has acquired enormous symbolic power because many Armenians increasingly feel that reconciliation has become a one-sided process in which Armenia makes concessions while Azerbaijan consolidates military victory and diplomatic leverage without restraint.

That perception carries serious political consequences for the normalization process. If regional integration and promising transport corridors are associated with the forsaking of prisoners and the definitive erasure of Artsakh’s Armenians—these projects will remain vulnerable no matter who wins the next elections.

Yet even Armenians open to compromise and coexistence struggle to understand why the issue of the prisoners receives so little sustained international attention at precisely the moment when Azerbaijan seeks broader legitimacy, deeper commercial partnerships, and expanded transit arrangements with the West.

The current diplomatic environment gives Europe and the United States more leverage than they appear willing to use, and that leverage is no longer theoretical. Rubio’s visit to Yerevan this week–three months after a historic visit by Vice President JD Vance–and the signing of a new U.S.-Armenia strategic partnership agreement reflect a profound geopolitical shift already underway across the South Caucasus.

Azerbaijan wants stability, investment, and recognition as a central transit and energy hub connecting Central Asia, the Caucasus, Turkey, and Europe. It wants infrastructure agreements to proceed smoothly. It wants long-term economic integration with Western markets and institutions. Armenia wants security, integration, and durable Western backing as it attempts its historic pivot away from Moscow despite growing Russian economic pressure and threats.

The region now stands closer than at any time in decades to a genuine reordering based on connectivity rather than armed confrontation. That makes this precisely the moment for Rubio, Washington, and Europe to insist on resolving the prisoner issue as part of the broader settlement rather than treating it as an inconvenient humanitarian side matter.

That makes this the moment to insist on resolving the prisoner issue as part of the broader settlement rather than treating it as an inconvenient side matter.

Western governments have repeatedly praised Armenia’s democratic development and its willingness to move toward compromise after military defeat. They have encouraged reconciliation and rewarded Yerevan diplomatically for pursuing a less confrontational path. Those same governments should now make clear that regional integration carries obligations for all parties, including Azerbaijan. The release of political detainees from Artsakh should become a central demand in negotiations surrounding transport corridors, economic partnerships, and normalization initiatives.

Such a step would strengthen moderates inside Armenia rather than weaken them. It would also show Armenians that Washington’s growing partnership with Yerevan is not purely transactional, but still tied to principles of political accountability and human dignity.

It would give Armenians evidence that diplomacy can still protect human dignity and national interests even after catastrophic loss. It would reduce the growing perception that Armenia alone absorbs sacrifice while the international system rewards power without accountability.

The alternative carries profound risks. Settlements engineered on the calculus of corridors and expediency have rarely outlasted the grievances they chose not to address. In societies marked by displacement and bitter loss, what is deferred is not resolved—it is harbored.

Peace agreements imposed without moral legitimacy rarely endure in places shaped by memory, displacement, and unresolved grief.

The South Caucasus stands at a rare historical opening, but true peace requires more than corridors, summits, and investment conferences. It requires a sense that justice still matters in the architecture of the new order taking shape across the region. Right now, the prisoners of Artsakh represent the clearest test of whether that principle survives.

Grigor Hovhannissian is Armenia’s former ambassador to the United States and Mexico and Armenia’s former deputy foreign minister.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.

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