RFE/RL – Pashinian Denies Meeting With Putin, Aliyev

According to the Kommersant daily, the unpublicized meeting was arranged by Putin’s top foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov, who approached Pashinian and Aliyev and briefly spoke with them during a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) summit held in the Central Asian state.

“It lasted for roughly fifteen minutes,” the paper claimed in a report that was not immediately confirmed by the Kremlin.

“In fact, a meeting in such a format did not take place,” a spokeswoman for Pashinian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.

Russia spearheaded the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process until Armenia began drifting away from its geopolitical orbit in 2022. After helping to the stop the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Moscow brokered Armenian-Azerbaijani understandings that called, among other things, for renewed transport links between the two South Caucasus nations. They were never implemented as Baku and Yerevan switched to Western mediation of their conflict.

The geopolitical shift culminated in the initialing in of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty at the White House in August 2025. During that summit hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump, Pashinian also pledged to open a U.S.-run transit corridor for Azerbaijan widely seen as another blow to Russian presence in the region. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov downplayed that development, saying that it did not necessarily resolve the long-running conflict.

Addressing the CIS summit, Pashinian again stated that peace has already been established between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“We have achieved the impossible with the president of Azerbaijan, and we need to safeguard the peace we have attained every day,” he said.

By contrast, Aliyev said nothing about the normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations in his speech at the summit.