In Armenia’s elections, a choice: Stay in Russia’s orbit or engage with the W

In 2020, Armenia suffered a huge military defeat at the hands of its historic rival Azerbaijan. Three years later, Azerbaijan compounded the indignity by overrunning the breakaway statelet of Nagorno-Karabakh, displacing its ethnically Armenian inhabitants.

For many Armenians, the losses were a deep humiliation, and they laid the blame at the feet of their prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan – all the more so because he signed a peace deal framework at the White House last August between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Now, Mr. Pashinyan is trying not just to realize peace, but to dramatically – and controversially – shift the foreign policy that has guided the Maryland-sized nation of 3 million since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. He is seeking a thaw with historic enemies Azerbaijan and Turkey while also reducing Armenia’s dependence on its traditional ally Russia, by building new links to the European Union and the United States.

And on June 7, Armenians will get to vote in parliamentary elections that will decide whether Mr. Pashinyan, the man who lost the war, will get a chance to execute his vision of peace.

“It’s a choice between the current trajectory versus the possibility of a reversal,” says Anna Ohanyan, an international relations professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts.

A painful peace proposal

Mr. Pashinyan, a pugilistic former newspaper editor, came to power in 2018 after leading massive street protests against the rigid, authoritarian elite who had run Armenia since independence. He undertook a series of democratic reforms, but he stuck to Armenia’s alliance with Russia.

Then in 2020, Azerbaijan resoundingly defeated Armenian forces that had long occupied a swath of western Azerbaijan to protect nominally independent Nagorno-Karabakh. The Kremlin brokered an agreement to keep the enclave out of Azerbaijani control and deployed 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to guard it. Despite the Armenian defeat, Mr. Pashinyan won a comfortable victory in a 2021 snap election.

But much has changed since. In 2023, Azerbaijan launched a new offensive and quickly overwhelmed Nagorno-Karabakh with little resistance from the Russian peacekeepers or Moscow – a betrayal for many Armenians. Some 100,000 residents fled to Armenia. And Mr. Pashinyan has engaged in an ugly feud with the Armenian Apostolic Church, further driving down his popularity.

Nonetheless, a late-May poll showed his Civil Contract party with a wide lead of 32% of the vote against a divided and equally unpopular opposition, with many people, especially young people, still undecided.

At a campaign stop in the lakeside town of Sevan, an hour’s drive north of the capital, Yerevan, Mr. Pashinyan told a few hundred supporters that a peace deal with Azerbaijan, combined with promised U.S. support and investment, will bring peace and prosperity to Armenia.

Some voters are amenable, if reluctantly.

“I’ll put it this way: I don’t love one or the other, [but] we’ve got to choose so that Armenia develops,” says Aram Sargisan, a jeweler from Yerevan who indicated he’ll vote for Civil Contract.

Mr. Pashinyan is pushing to finalize the peace deal and to normalize relations with Turkey by dropping historical territorial claims and accepting what he calls “Real Armenia” – the 11,500 square miles within its internationally recognized borders. Reopening trade with Turkey and Azerbaijan will allow the economy to flourish, Mr. Pashinyan argues.

But it is a tough pitch. The Ottoman government in Turkey killed around 1 million Armenians in events widely considered to be a genocide during World War I, and the very recent military humiliation against Azerbaijan still stings.

Anna, a design student at Yerevan State University who declined to give her last name, isn’t sure for whom she will cast her ballot. But she is certain of one thing: It won’t be for Mr. Pashinyan. Reconciliation with Turkey and Azerbaijan isn’t possible, says Anna, who lost great-grandparents in the genocide. “I cannot forget what they did to Armenia,” she says.

Reshaping Armenia’s relations

Sunday’s elections have earned unprecedented attention from the White House and the Kremlin, since the prime minister’s international plans would significantly shift the balance of power at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.

Mr. Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a peace deal framework at the White House Aug. 9 with U.S. President Donald Trump sitting between them. Key to the peace is the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” a trade corridor that will run through southern Armenia, connect Azerbaijan’s mainland to its exclave of Nakhchivan, and then continue on to Turkey.

The corridor will be developed by the United States, representing a bridgehead for American influence in a region Russia considers well within its sphere of influence.

The Trump administration views the peace deal framework as one of its key foreign policy achievements and is squarely behind Mr. Pashinyan.

Vice President JD Vance came to Armenia in February, the highest-level American official to ever visit the country, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio jetted into Yerevan May 26 to hype the deal. On May 28, Mr. Trump posted a social media endorsement of Mr. Pashinyan, calling him a “great friend and Leader.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has dialed up pressure on Mr. Pashinyan as he has made overtures westward.

In recent weeks, Russia has threatened its supply of discounted gas to Armenia, banned most agricultural imports from the country, and demanded Yerevan decide whether it wants to join the EU or stay in a Russia-led customs union “as soon as possible.”

Russia is also conducting an influence campaign against Mr. Pashinyan, and mulled a plan to fly thousands of Russian Armenians back to the country to vote against him, Reuters reported this week, citing Western intelligence officials.

Yet, despite talk of a pivot to Europe and the U.S., Armenia’s economy remains intertwined with Russia’s, and Russia has a military base in Armenia.

“Armenia does not want to abandon relations with Russia,” says Sargis Khandanyan, a Civil Contract member of Parliament. “Our foreign policy is a foreign policy of balances.”

Russian gravity

Mr. Pashinyan’s principal opponents in the election, who are closely aligned with Russia, vehemently oppose the prime minister’s peace plans with Azerbaijan.

Armenian Russian oligarch Samvel Karapetyan, leader of the Strong Armenia party, has emerged as Mr. Pashinyan’s main challenger. He wants to scrap the peace framework with Azerbaijan in favor of retaining firm ties with Russia.

Mr. Pashinyan is ruining the alliance with Russia, said Karen, a veteran of the Karabakh conflict who declined to give his last name, as he waited for a Strong Armenia rally to begin on June 3. “We’ve been friends with the Russians for so many years.”

Though thousands of his supporters marched at the rally, Mr. Karapetyan did not; he was under house arrest, and appeared only by video link. Authorities arrested him last year on charges of calling for the overthrow of the government. Mr. Karapetyan has called the allegations politically motivated.

Yet neither former President Robert Kocharyan, Mr. Pashinyan’s other pro-Russia challenger who is widely viewed as a relic of a previous era, nor Mr. Karapetyan have offered a concrete alternative to Mr. Pashinyan’s peace plan, says Yevgenya Paturyan, a political science professor at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan. “Only those who really hate Pashinyan and want him out at any cost are willing to follow these guys,” she says.

So, the unpopular prime minister and his “Real Armenia” vision may come away with victory on Sunday.

“We want peace, to be friends with everyone, to open the borders, to trade,” Pashinyan supporter Aida Navasardyan said as the prime minister’s campaign bus pulled out of Sevan. “No one wants war anymore.”