The West has a unique chance to embrace Armenia

by Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, opinion contributor – 04/22/26 7:00 AM ET

In early May, Yerevan will host a rare concentration of European leaders, followed immediately by the first-ever EU-Armenia summit.

For a small, landlocked country long fixed in Russia’s orbit, this is a visible reordering of alignment. Armenia is moving closer to Europe, and Europe is beginning to show up in Armenia in ways that are concrete, public, and difficult to reverse.

It is hardly surprising that Moscow is clarifying the stakes. At an April 1 meeting in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin delivered an ominous message to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan: Armenia cannot simultaneously deepen integration with the European Union and remain inside Russia-led economic structures. The ambiguity that has allowed Armenia to balance between systems up to now is no longer sustainable, he said.

On paper, this is a technical argument about incompatible regulatory regimes. But in reality, it lands very differently in a country where Russian power is not an abstraction. Russia maintains a military presence inside Armenia. For decades, this presence has been framed as a security guarantee — part of a broader architecture that tied Armenia to Moscow through the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union.

But that architecture has already been called into question. In 2020, and again in 2023, Russia failed to aid Armenia in its long-running conflict with Azerbaijan, despite having deployed peacekeepers on the ground. When Azerbaijan’s forces moved decisively into the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Russian peacekeepers stood aside as more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled.

Many Armenians concluded that the security guarantees underpinning its alignment with Moscow were far less reliable than advertised.

That experience hangs over Putin’s warning. A statement that Armenia, a former Soviet republic, cannot “be in both places at once” is heard not as a neutral economic observation but in the context of a power that has shown and its willingness to enforce red lines in its so-called near abroad.

For decades, Russia has treated the post-Soviet space as a privileged sphere of influence, where Western engagement is viewed not as competition but as intrusion. Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine were expressions of a broader doctrine that rejects the permanent drift of neighboring states toward Western institutions.

As they weigh this situation, Western policymakers might consider how these dynamics play out across parts of the Russian neighborhood — a combination of economic pressure, political influence and interference aimed at obstructing sovereign choices and replicating its own political model, with a resulting steady democratic backsliding. This is precisely the kind of grey-zone dynamic Russia employs with consistency.

Armenia is now at an earlier stage of a similar test. The difference is that the signals are clearer, and the West still has the opportunity to shape the outcome. But that window may not remain open indefinitely.

This is what gives the upcoming Yerevan summit its significance. For Western policymakers, the stakes extend far beyond Armenia itself. The South Caucasus sits at a geographic crossroads linking Europe to Central Asia — a narrow but increasingly vital corridor connecting the Caspian basin to the Black Sea and onward to European markets. As war in Ukraine has disrupted traditional routes through Russia, these East–West pathways have taken on new urgency.

They are not just trade routes. They are instruments of strategic diversification — of energy flows that bypass Russia, of supply chains that reduce dependency, of connectivity that reshapes regional alignments.

Armenia’s role within this landscape is not yet fully defined, but it is potentially significant. It borders Turkey, a NATO member, and sits adjacent to key transit routes that could either include it or bypass it entirely. Integrated into these networks, Armenia could become a stabilizing link in a broader system connecting Europe to Central Asia. Excluded, it risks remaining on the margins — geographically central, but strategically sidelined.

The presence of regional leaders at the May 4 European Political Community Summit in Yerevan, followed by the EU meeting, must translate into structure: investment in connectivity, deeper economic integration, and mechanisms to absorb external pressure. Symbolism alone will not offset the costs that may come with reformatting the regional political and economic landscape.

But Europe cannot carry this alone. The U.S., though not central to the summit stage, remains the decisive strategic actor. Washington holds the financial, political, and security levers that can anchor Armenia’s shift in a way that is credible rather than aspirational.

That means backing infrastructure that links Armenia into East-West corridors, mobilizing development finance and private investment. Indeed, the Trump administration is already invested in the process through the TRIPP corridor it championed last summer, which helped calm tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan and was hailed in Washington as a major achievement.

The question now is whether the West is prepared to move fast enough to ensure that Armenia’s shift becomes durable.

Zohrab Mnatsakanyan is the former foreign minister of Armenia.