By Irakli Laitadze

On June 7, Armenia held general elections with significant implications for both the country and the South Caucasus. Incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won 49.81 percent of the vote. Although falling short of a majority, the result still enables Pashinyan to form and lead the new government. The victory of Civil Contract is not merely an outcome of domestic politics. It signifies a rupture with Russia’s sphere of influence and the institutionalization of a pro-Western course. The collapse of the pro-Russian opposition, despite unprecedented pressure from Moscow, indicates that Armenian citizens made a strategic choice in favor of genuine sovereignty and European integration. This choice is likely to produce long-term changes not only in Armenia but also in the security architecture of the South Caucasus.

BACKGROUND:

Armenia approached the 7 June elections amid intense geopolitical turbulence. The country stood at a crossroads between two incompatible trajectories: deeper Euro-Atlantic integration or a return to Russia’s sphere of influence. Understanding this choice requires examining developments in the recent past.

Following its defeat in the 2020 Karabakh War, Armenia completely lost control of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. The country was confronted with a harsh reality: Russia, its ally and partner within the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), failed to defend Armenia during the conflict. As a result, Prime Minister Pashinyan’s government intensified the already ongoing process of deepening ties with the EU and the U.S. In March 2026, the Armenian parliament adopted a bill initiating the process of accession to the EU. Consequently, the elections effectively became a referendum on Armenia’s foreign policy orientation and security strategy.

Russia responded with increased pressure. The election campaign was effectively transformed into an open confrontation between Moscow and Yerevan. Russian officials publicly warned that continued pursuit of a pro-Western course could expose Armenia to a scenario similar to that experienced by Ukraine.

The regional dimension is equally important. The South Caucasus is a region where the interests of Russia, Turkey, Iran, the U.S., the EU, and increasingly China intersect. Armenia has traditionally been a stronghold of Russian influence in the region: Russian forces are stationed at the 102nd Military Base in Gyumri, an aviation component is based at Erebuni Air Base, and Armenia remains a member of the CSTO. Yerevan’s drift away from Moscow represents more than the loss of an ally; it is a strategic setback that could reshape the regional balance of power. This explains why the stakes were far higher than those of a regular parliamentary election.

IMPLICATIONS:

Russia’s attempt to influence the election outcome was not only unsuccessful but also counterproductive. In addition to extensive use of bots, disinformation, and fake news, reports suggest that Moscow was covertly preparing operations aimed at preventing Pashinyan’s re-election, allegedly including scenarios involving his physical elimination.

Russian economic pressure was systematic and sustained. Moscow banned imports of Armenian Jermuk mineral water, halted sales of Armenian brandy and wine, and reduced imports of meat and fish products. On the eve of the elections, Russia sent an official letter signaling its intention to suspend exports of gas, oil, and diamonds. Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia’s federal veterinary and phytosanitary agency, also banned imports of Armenian tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and dried fruits. To influence the vote, plans were reportedly discussed to organize travel to Armenia for around 100,000 Russia-based Armenians.

The pro-Russian camp was represented by two key figures: Samvel Karapetyan and Ruben Vardanyan. Both embodied an alternative to Armenia’s Western-oriented course. Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire and leader of the Strong Armenia electoral bloc, lived in Moscow until last year and, in addition to Armenian citizenship, held Russian and Cypriot citizenship. He allegedly maintains links with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Since June 2025, Karapetyan has been under house arrest on charges of encouraging the seizure of state institutions. Moscow openly demanded his release and participation in the parliamentary elections, turning the issue into a political instrument of pressure on Yerevan.

Another key figure was Ruben Vardanyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire who left Moscow to become State Minister of the self-proclaimed Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. Arrested by Azerbaijani authorities while leaving Nagorno-Karabakh through the Lachin Corridor, he is currently serving a prison sentence in Azerbaijan (Meduza). Vardanyan became both a symbol of the lost Armenian Karabakh and a reminder of the failure of the pro-Russian course, which ultimately provided Armenia with neither security nor genuine independence.

The election results reflected the Armenian public’s increasingly negative attitude toward Russia. Samvel Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia alliance received 23.29 percent of the vote, while the Armenia bloc, led by former President Robert Kocharyan, a veteran of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and a prominent advocate of close ties with Moscow, won 9.93 percent. Combined, the main pro-Russian forces secured only about two-thirds of the support received by Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party.

Western countries, particularly the U.S., expressed unusually strong support for Nikol Pashinyan. On May 27, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly endorsed Pashinyan on Truth Social. The previous day, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan signed several bilateral cooperation agreements, including a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Charter. On June 4, following a telephone conversation with Pashinyan, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that Brussels was preparing additional support measures for Armenia, including €50 million in financial assistance.

The 8th Summit of the European Political Community (EPC) was held in Yerevan on 4 May 2026, with the participation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The event served as a clear signal of Armenia’s emerging European orientation and identity. Almost simultaneously, Turkey partially lifted the trade restrictions on Armenia that had been in place since 1993. The easing of this economic embargo marks a significant step toward the normalization of Armenian–Turkish relations and has the potential to reshape the region’s economic architecture.

A stable, pro-Western Armenia would be better positioned to finalize a peace agreement with Azerbaijan and secure the full lifting of Turkey’s long-standing economic blockade. Under such circumstances, Armenia’s withdrawal from the CSTO could become a realistic prospect in the near future. This step would deprive Russia of the principal legal framework underpinning its military presence in Armenia, further accelerating the country’s geopolitical reorientation.

Armenia is expected to continue developing its relations with the EU while maintaining membership in the Eurasian Economic Union, as confirmed by Prime Minister Pashinyan. This reflects tactical pragmatism rather than an ideological compromise: Armenia remains dependent on Russian gas imports and on the large Armenian diaspora residing in Russia. Nevertheless, the country’s strategic orientation toward Europe appears to have been firmly established.

CONCLUSIONS:

The elections of 7 June may prove to be a point of no return in the history of post-Soviet Armenia. Despite political pressure, economic coercion, and extensive Russian involvement, Armenian voters endorsed a genuinely sovereign choice and reaffirmed the country’s commitment to a pro-Western path of development.

Russia suffered a strategic defeat, as neither Karapetyan nor Kocharyan succeeded in challenging the pro-Western majority of Armenian voters. The Kremlin’s unprecedented pressure, including threats of a “Ukrainian scenario” and the use of economic coercion, failed to weaken Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters. Instead, these measures contributed to their further mobilization and strengthened Pashinyan’s image as a defender of Armenian sovereignty and statehood.

The electoral victory of Civil Contract and its parliamentary majority provide Armenia’s pro-European course with a clear democratic mandate to advance further along the path of European integration.

Armenia is entering a phase of profound transformation in its security architecture, moving from dependence on Russia toward a more diversified and multilateral security framework. This realignment is likely to reshape not only Armenian domestic and foreign policy but also the broader balance of power in the South Caucasus. For the first time in the post-Soviet era, Armenia, and, to a lesser extent, the wider region, is beginning to move beyond the logic of Russian dominance. The date of June 7, 2026, may be remembered as the day Armenia chose its own future.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Irakli Laitadze is an Adjunct Professor at Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia) and Senior Fellow of the think-tank EU Awareness Centre (Brussels). He was previously a career diplomat, serving as a senior Counsellor in the Mission of Georgia to the EU and Director of the EU Political Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia. After his diplomatic service, he was the CFO in GMT Hospitality and CEO of Publishing House Artanuji. He holds degrees from Tbilisi State University, the Diplomatic School of Madrid (Diploma), and Cambridge University (MBA), and a Ph.D. (Magna cum laude) from Tbilisi Free University. 

By Jordan N. Troisi

Russia’s recent school enrollment restrictions and rigorous language testing for Central Asian migrant children underscore a fraying post-Soviet educational default. While Russia remains an inherited educational pathway, its relative dominance is being eroded by its own restrictive policies, new external destinations, and Central Asian states becoming destinations in their own right. Consequently, states and institutions seeking a role in the region’s education landscape can no longer rely on old geopolitical defaults or view Central Asia simply as an outbound market. To remain credible, they must build tangible, long-term pathways tailored to the practical push and pull factors shaping student mobility.

BACKGROUND:

As a legacy of its imperial and Soviet past, Russia has remained the default international education pathway for many Central Asian students since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with language, credentials, professional networks, labor migration, and family mobility reinforcing one another. This is partly why Russian influence has endured; education sits inside a broader inherited system rather than apart from it. However, Russia itself is complicating its position as a welcoming destination. Its crackdown on Central Asian migrants, expanding since 2024, now bars children of immigrants from attending Russian schools unless they pass a difficult Russian-language exam and their parents prove legal registration. Early implementation results showed that only about 19 percent of migrant children applicants were even allowed to take the proficiency exam. Many families, reading the writing on the wall, are considering returning home. These pressures matter because educational mobility, particularly toward former colonial powers, often begins before university through questions of language, schooling, legal status, and future work opportunities.

At the same time, a recent New Lines Institute article argues that the U.S. has an opportunity to expand influence in Central Asia through higher education, framing international education in the region primarily as a contest between Washington and Beijing. This correctly identifies the strategic importance of educational diplomacy but misses the wider regional picture. Flattening Central Asia’s educational mobility into great power competition risks overlooking the perspectives of those making mobility decisions. Central Asian students are part of a global movement of nearly 7.3 million students studying abroad, and while geopolitics shape their available options, the push and pull factors influencing their decisions are inherently practical.

In short, educational mobility in Central Asia is becoming increasingly complex, not because one actor is being displaced by others, but because the old default is eroding under the pressure of overlapping factors and the availability of new options. Those who continue to read the region simply as an outbound market or primarily as an arena of great power competition risk misunderstanding this shift and missing opportunities for deeper ties with an increasingly consequential region.

IMPLICATIONS:

This shift has three major implications. First, recruitment alone is no longer enough. Central Asian students continue to seek educational opportunities abroad, but in an increasingly crowded market, access alone is a thinner basis for engagement. As students gain more options, destinations and programs that offer little beyond admission will be less compelling than those that connect education to recognized credentials, professional mobility, and credible post-graduation opportunities. The countries and institutions that understand this will be better positioned than those that treat student mobility as a matter of simply attracting students outward.
Second, states and institutions are increasingly building within the region, not only recruiting from it. This includes newer entrants, like the EU, which held the first Central Asia–European Union University Congress, in Samarkand in April 2026. The congress framed engagement not only around student exchange to Europe, but as an “important platform to advance academic cooperation,” with Uzbekistan touting more than 50 signed agreements and stronger partnerships with European universities.

It also includes China, which has moved furthest in this direction. Rather than simply trying to displace Russia by student volume, it is folding education into a larger regional presence and longer-term strategy. Education is being linked to technology, infrastructure, language, and vocational capacity, making China one of the most active emerging education actors in the region. Indicative of this shift, in April it opened additional Luban Workshops in Turkmenistan, including at the International University of Oil and Gas during a high-level visit by First Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang. This fits into a broader Chinese regional strategy that is picking up pace. At the June 2025 China-Central Asia Summit in Astana, President Xi said China was ready to expand cultural centers, university branches, and Luban Workshops across the region, while launching new Central Asian language programs in Chinese universities and continuing the China-Central Asia technology and skills improvement scheme. Under this model, education is more than soft power; it supports the development of infrastructure for long-term regional cooperation.

Third, Central Asia itself is becoming a destination, further complicating the old outbound model. Kazakhstan is leading the way, with the government seeking to host 150,000 international students by 2029. Recent news from Uzbekistan illustrates a shift in both directions. In 2025, Uzbekistan’s outbound education travel fell to 28,954 students amid rapid domestic educational growth. Russia, narrowly ahead of Tajikistan, remaining the top international destination. At the same time, the growing presence of Uzbek students in South Korea shows that mobility is spreading across a wider map. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan reported that incoming international students rose over 54 percent, mainly from India, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, with smaller increases from Pakistan and China. This expansion occurs alongside deeper institutional engagement, with the number of foreign universities in Uzbekistan increasing to 30 in late 2025. Kyrgyzstan has seen similar results. Among its 49,553 international students by the start of the 2024 academic year, Uzbekistan was the largest sender, followed by India and Pakistan, reported IOM.

Together, these cases trace a shift away from treating Central Asia primarily as a recruitment market, toward a more complicated mobility landscape. Today’s education pathways shape tomorrow’s economic opportunities, which is why the stakes extend beyond student numbers. International educational engagement increasingly depends less on abstract soft-power appeals than on the ability to build credible, usable, and durable pathways. As Central Asian students and families gain more options, they are becoming more discerning decision-makers. Institutions and countries interested in engaging with the region should take note.

CONCLUSIONS:

Russia’s restrictions on Central Asian migrant children are not just a matter of domestic education policy. They are a signal that the old post-Soviet educational default is fraying. Central Asia’s student mobility is not shifting from Russia to another concentrated center, but becoming increasingly pluralistic, shaped by new destinations, regional alternatives, and family calculations about long-term opportunities. The strategic significance is not that students are choosing geopolitical sides; it is that educational engagement now depends less on recruitment alone and more on whether states and institutions can build credible pathways in an increasingly pluralistic landscape.

States and institutions that recognize this shift early will be better positioned to build durable educational ties, while those still relying on dated frames of Central Asia as a recruitment market or secondary arena of great power competition risk falling behind in a region already on the move.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Jordan N. Troisi is a doctoral researcher in Global Studies in Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and former Country Director for American Councils for International Education in Azerbaijan. Based in Tashkent, his research examines how geopolitics shapes student mobility and transnational education. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent any institution or organization.

By Vali Kaleji 

While the Armenian government appears to seek a short-term balance between the U.S. and Russia in the railway sector, its long-term objective is to end Russia’s monopoly and extensive influence over this critical infrastructure in Armenia. The realization of this objective, as well as reforms in the electricity and gas sectors, largely depends on the outcome of the decisive parliamentary elections on June 7, 2026. These elections will determine whether Armenia returns to its pre-2018 foreign policy orientation or continues its recent trajectory toward closer alignment with the West.

 Photo by Denis Belitsky, 2023

BACKGROUND:

On 13 February 2008, Armenia signed an agreement transferring full control of the state-owned Armenian Railways to South Caucasus Railway (Yuzhno-Kavkazskaya zheleznaya doroga, YuKZhD), a wholly owned subsidiary of Russian Railways (RZhD). Subject to mutual agreement, the contract may be extended until 2048. The agreement followed a concession model, transferring operational, managerial, and investment responsibilities to the Russian side. Although ownership of the railway infrastructure formally remained with the Armenian government, operational control, investment decisions, tariff policy, and network development were effectively placed under Russian authority, constituting influence without formal ownership.

The 2008 railway agreement was effectively a continuation, and one of the consequences, of the 2002–2003 “debt-for-assets” agreement between Armenia and Russia, which settled Armenia’s US$ 96 million debt to Russia. The 30-year concession agreement is widely regarded as a major turning point in the development of Russia’s structural influence over Armenia’s economy and infrastructure in the post-Soviet period. Under the debt-for-assets arrangement, ownership or management of six major industrial and economic assets in Armenia, including electricity, gas, electronics, and defense-related sectors, was transferred to Russia, facilitating Russian dominance and influence in other sectors, including railways and telecommunications.

To reduce this monopoly and dependency, the Armenian government signed an agreement with Iran in 2009, one year after the 30-year concession agreement, to construct the “Marand–Norooz–Meghri–Yerevan” railway. Russia opposedthe project, and despite considerable efforts by Armenia, the railway was never realized, leaving Russia’s monopoly over Armenia’s railway network intact.

Plans to revive Soviet-era railway routes in the southern South Caucasus failed to materialize in the transformed regional environment following the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. However, the peace agreement signed by Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan at the White House on August 8, 2025, marked a new phase in the construction and integration of road and railway routes in southern Armenia. Nevertheless, despite the completion of approximately 80 percent of the 110-kilometer Horadiz–Aghband railway line in southwestern Azerbaijan (around 140 kilometers including auxiliary routes), and Turkey’s initiation of a new 224-kilometer railway line from Kars to the Nakhichevan border, scheduled for completion before 2030, the rehabilitation and construction of the railway line in southern Armenia has yet to begin.

In these circumstances, during a press briefing on February 13, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that a country maintaining “friendly relations” with both Russia and Armenia could “purchase the concession management rights” of Armenia’s railways, which are currently under Russian management. He presented this as a potential solution to Armenia’s loss of “competitive advantage” by having international routes pass through the country. When asked which states could assume such a role, Pashinyan mentioned Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Qatar, while noting that the list was not exhaustive.

IMPLICATIONS:

Pashinyan’s recent statements may represent the latest step by the Armenian government to reduce the country’s dependence on Russia in the infrastructure sector. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian control and influence over Armenia’s railway network and railway management became particularly significant due to Armenia’s status as a landlocked country. After the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenia’s railway routes with Azerbaijan (the eastern route) and Turkey (the western route) were closed. The disruption of railway connections between Armenia and Azerbaijan also severed Armenia’s rail link with Iran via the Julfa–Nakhichevan route. Consequently, over the past three decades, Armenia’s only active railway connection has been the northern route, a Soviet-era railway line running through Georgia to Russia and the Black Sea. Notably, despite the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Russia and Georgia following the August 2008 war, this railway corridor, like the road route, has remained open and operational.

The absence of Armenia’s railway connectivity in three directions, eastward towards Azerbaijan, southward towards Iran, and westward towards Nakhichevan and Turkey, and the country’s dependence on the northern route through Georgia to Russia significantly strengthened the monopoly position and influence of the Russian-controlled South Caucasus Railway company. The Armenian government’s new approach therefore represents a step toward reducing Russia’s monopoly and influence over Armenia’s railway infrastructure, while also diversifying the country’s rail connections.

However, the most noteworthy aspect is Russia’s continued presence in these developments. Although Russia was excluded from the agreements reached during the Washington summit, it nevertheless expressed readiness to discuss possible participation in the Trump Route with Armenia. Mikhail Kalugin, Director of the Fourth CIS Department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, argued that “there are ample grounds” for such involvement. Among other points, Kalugin referred to South Caucasus Railway, which “holds a concession to manage Armenia’s railway network.”

On the other hand, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan revealed that he had asked Russia to “urgently address” the full restoration of railway sections adjacent to the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan and the Turkish border. The issue concerns three key railway sections: Yeraskh–Nakhichevan, Gyumri–Kars, and Ijevan–Gazakh. Pashinyan stated that he had raised the matter with Russia more than a month earlier.

However, the Armenian government appears to support Russian participation and investment only in railway sections located outside the so-called “Trump Route.” Addressing possible Russian involvement in the project, Nikol Pashinyan stated that the route is a bilateral initiative with the U.S., adding that “any third-party involvement can be discussed only bilaterally.” Pashinyan also responded to the South Caucasus Railway’s expressed readiness to transfer only the Meghri railway section, through which the Trump Route is expected to pass, from its administration to Armenia, arguing that the statement reflected a “misunderstanding.” “The [Meghri railway] section is not under Russian management for it to be handed over to Armenia. It is Armenia’s sovereign territory, and we have not delegated the management of that sovereign territory to anyone. There is no railway there to be managed by anyone,” Pashinyan stated.

In fact, as Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk stated, the Russian Federation has decided to begin substantive negotiations on the restoration of two sections of Armenia’s railway network that would reconnect Armenian railways with the railway network of the Republic of Azerbaijan near the town of Yeraskh and with the railway network of the Republic of Turkey near the settlement of Akhuryan. The total length of the sections to be restored has been announced as 1.6 kilometers and 12.4 kilometers, respectively. All of these sections exclude southern Armenia, through which the Trump Route is expected to pass. Nevertheless, the reopening of these railway sections forms part of the Pashinyan government’s Crossroads of Peace project.

CONCLUSIONS:

Armenia’s exit from political and military dependence on Russia is unlikely without ending Russia’s monopoly over the country’s economic infrastructure. The Armenian government took an initial step in this direction by nationalizing the country’s electricity grid, and on July 9, 2025, Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan signed a law permitting the nationalization of the national electricity distribution company. However, this decision became politically contentious following the arrest of opposition leader Samvel Karapetyan, who had acquired full ownership of the Armenian Power Grid Company and the Hrazdan Thermal Power Plant in 2017.

Armenia’s dependence on Russian-controlled economic infrastructure extends beyond railways and electricity. The exclusive supplier of natural gas in Armenia’s domestic market is Gazprom Armenia, a Russian-Armenian company established in December 1997, whose shares are wholly owned by Russia’s Gazprom. Consequently, Armenia’s efforts to end Russia’s monopoly and influence over its economic infrastructure face significant obstacles. The realization of this objective will largely depend on the outcome of the crucial parliamentary elections on June 7, 2026, which will determine whether Armenia returns to its pre-2018 foreign policy orientation or continues its recent trajectory toward closer alignment with the West.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Vali Kaleji, based in Tehran, Iran, holds a Ph.D. in Regional Studies, Central Asian and Caucasian Studies. He has published numerous analytical articles on Eurasian issues for the Eurasia Daily Monitor, the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, The Middle East Institute and the Valdai Club. He can be reached at  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

By Laura Linderman and Lydia Sawatsky

The catastrophic flooding that struck Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan in late March and early April 2026, the worst rainfall event the republic has seen in over a century, has done more than damage homes and infrastructure. It has exposed the limits of Russian state capacity on its southern periphery at a moment when Moscow's grip on the wider Caucasus is already loosening, and it has done so along the precise ethnic and territorial seam where the Kremlin has long kept what the Chechen analyst Inal Sherip has called the "Lezgin card" in reserve. The Kremlin's belated and rhetorically defensive response, set against a more coherent Azerbaijani posture to the same storm, will accelerate Baku's strategic recalibration away from Moscow and rearrange political loyalties along the Lezgin cross-border zone in ways Russia has no current means to repair.

BACKGROUND:

Between March 27 and April 8, an unusually intense Caspian cyclone delivered rainfall to Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan that meteorologists in both countries have described as a record-breaking event of a scale not seen in 107 years. At an April 9 meeting on the disaster, Vladimir Putin himself observed that "since meteorological observations began, in 1882, such figures have never been recorded in the region." By that point, at least seven people had been confirmed dead in Dagestan, more than 6,200 had been evacuated, around 1.5 million had been affected in some way, and over 6,000 residential buildings had been damaged or submerged. The Gedzhukh reservoir dam in Derbentsky district was overtopped on April 5, sweeping cars off the federal motorway. Sections of the Caucasus federal motorway and the North Caucasus Railway were severed, and three substations in Makhachkala (Primorskaya, Vostochnaya, and Makhachkala-110) were flooded and temporarily knocked offline. Yuri Chaika, the Presidential Plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus Federal District, put initial damage at over one billion rubles. On April 7, Putin directed the elevation of the regional emergency to federal status, with the formal designation issued by the government commission on April 9.

The same storm did not stop at the international border. In Azerbaijan, it caused fatal flooding in Baku's Yeni-Ramana settlement on March 27 and 28, the death of a man swept away by floodwaters in Gusar district on April 5, and the collapse of a house in Baku's Sabunchu district on the night of April 7. The worst-affected Azerbaijani districts (Gusar, Khachmaz, and Quba) are precisely those where the country's Lezgin minority is most heavily concentrated.

The official Russian response combined high-profile federal visits with a striking reluctance to take responsibility. Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Kurenkov, Construction Minister Irek Faizullin, and Natural Resources Minister Alexander Kozlov all traveled to Dagestan. Sergei Melikov, the head of Dagestan, nevertheless attributed the loss of life among motorists swept off the federal motorway to local "carelessness," and blamed flooding in Makhachkala on "reckless" real estate development. Residents were not persuaded. Novaya Gazeta Europa quoted a resident of Mamedkala who said that the only reason fatalities had not run into the dozens was that locals were pulling each other from the floodwaters themselves. Moscow's instinct to manage the crisis through televised commission meetings rather than visible mobilization on the ground reflects a federal centre that is overstretched, not one choosing restraint.

IMPLICATIONS:

The political significance of the floods extends beyond the disaster itself, because they have arrived at a moment when several reinforcing trends across the Caucasus are converging.

The first is the visible thinness of Russian state capacity outside the Kremlin's core priorities. In the same week Moscow elevated the Dagestan emergency, it absorbed the loss of its last functioning railway ferry across the Kerch Strait to Ukrainian drone strikes. Federal budget transfers, once routine for the North Caucasus, are now constrained by wartime spending and sanctions. Chronic unemployment, entrenched corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure, and reliance on heavy-handed security policies remain unresolved across the North Caucasus, continuing to fuel local grievances. The entire Kadyrov model of patronage-based stability rests on a federal balance sheet that is no longer flush, and the perception of decline now circulates openly in exile and opposition spaces. In late April, the former Chechen deputy prime minister Ruslan Kutaev, who now leads the Assembly of Peoples of the Caucasus, publicly claimed that "everyone knows Putin has lost" and that the great majority of Kadyrov's forces would switch sides at the right moment. The claim is contested, but its open airing is itself a marker of what exile figures now feel free to assert.

The second is the changing posture of Baku. Azerbaijan, hit by the same storm, has handled its response more conventionally. The country has its own constraints; residents in Baku's Yeni-Ramana settlement blocked a road in late March to protest inadequate drainage after rainfall killed two people near a damaged power cable, and Baku city authorities attributed some of the worst flooding to housing built without compliance with safety codes. But Baku has not attributed specific deaths to the carelessness of the dead. Through its Ministry of Emergency Situations, it has evacuated more than 450 people from flood zones, issued regular briefings, announced an expansion of its agricultural insurance regime to cover flood losses on April 8, and on April 28 President Ilham Aliyev allocated 85.9 million manat (approximately 50 million USD) from his reserve fund for flood relief. The political tone in Azerbaijani state media has been one of administrative competence and immediate action rather than recrimination.

This contrast matters because Azerbaijan has spent the past eighteen months systematically distancing itself from Moscow. Following the December 2024 destruction of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 by Russian air defenses over Grozny, and the June 2025 Yekaterinburg raids in which two ethnic Azerbaijani brothers died in Russian custody, Baku closed the Russian House, suspended Sputnik Azerbaijan, sued Russia internationally, and at the February 2026 Munich Security Conference President Aliyev publicly accused Moscow of three deliberate strikes on Azerbaijani diplomatic facilities in Kyiv. The trajectory has only accelerated. On April 25, four days after the federal emergency was declared in Dagestan, Aliyev hosted Volodymyr Zelensky in Gabala on the Ukrainian leader's first visit to the South Caucasus since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and the two presidents signed six bilateral agreements concentrated on defense-industrial cooperation, joint production, and the deployment of Ukrainian drone specialists in Azerbaijan. Every image of Russian inadequacy on Azerbaijan's northern doorstep validates Baku's strategic choice.

Baku's confidence rests on more than rhetoric. The early-2026 strikes on Iran have reduced the third regional power with traditional interests in the borderlands to silence born of weakness rather than restraint, and the Iran war has paralysed the International North-South Transport Corridor through banking and insurance restrictions, redirecting Eurasian cargo to the Trans-Caspian route through Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, where demand surged 450 to 500 percent in a single week. Baku has also kept its land borders, including with Russia, closed since the COVID-19 pandemic, retaining the closure for political reasons. There are no longer direct flights from Baku to any Dagestani or Chechen city. That Azerbaijan can simultaneously absorb a war next door, manage the diversion of Eurasian transit through its own ports, and project administrative competence in a domestic flood response is itself a measure of how far the regional balance has shifted.

The third element, and the most underappreciated, is the cross-border ethnic dimension. The areas of Dagestan worst affected, Derbentsky and Magaramkentsky districts and the southern coastal belt, are the historic homeland of the Lezgin people, who number roughly 800,000 in southern Dagestan and between 180,000 and 260,000 in northern Azerbaijan. As Sherip notes, demographics heighten fragility: Dagestan alone hosts an Azerbaijani community of roughly 120,000, more than a third of the population of Derbent, while Azerbaijan hosts approximately 250,000 Lezgins and Avars, meaning any cross-border incident would almost inevitably spill across the frontier. Sergei Melikov, notably, is the first ethnic Lezgin to head Dagestan; with a Lezgin father and a Russian mother, he was born in Orekhovo-Zuyevo near Moscow and made his career in the federal security services, with no ties to Dagestan or its local elites before Putin appointed him acting head in October 2020. The Samur River that forms much of the international border is itself part of the flood story. Moscow has historically managed this frontier by holding the "Lezgin card" in reserve, quietly cultivating the Sadval movement and other Lezgin nationalist organizations in the 1990s as leverage against Baku and then letting them wither when Azerbaijani concessions were required. The flood inverts this calculation. A perception that Moscow neither protects nor compensates Lezgins on its side of the border, while Baku at least musters a coherent administrative response on its side, is the kind of fact that reshapes long-term political loyalties at the margins.

The fourth element is recent political memory. The September 2022 anti-mobilization protests in Makhachkala and Endirei were the largest in the North Caucasus and the first significant public unrest in the republic in a decade. They were touched off by the same dynamic now visible in the flood response: a federal centre that extracts more from Dagestan than it provides. The flood does not, by itself, manufacture a protest movement. But the conditions that produced 2022 (the perception of federal extraction, official contempt for local life, and the absence of meaningful Dagestani representation in Moscow's calculations) are all reinforced by what Dagestanis are seeing this month. Dagestan has been disproportionately mobilized for the war in Ukraine, has been chronically underfunded for infrastructure, and is now being told by its own governor that its dead were simply careless.

CONCLUSIONS:

The Dagestan floods of 2026 will not, in themselves, dislodge Sergei Melikov or destabilize the Russian Federation's hold on its southern periphery. Melikov's regional security apparatus remains coherent, and the federal centre has committed visible resources. What the floods will do is accelerate trends already in motion. Baku will read the contrast between the two responses as further confirmation that its strategic distancing from Moscow carries declining costs, a reading already legible in the Gabala signings of April 25. Yerevan, watching from across the South Caucasus, will draw the same conclusion: that a Russian state which cannot compensate flood victims on its own southern periphery is unlikely to provide the security guarantees it has long been asked to provide. The Lezgin cross-border community will quietly absorb the lesson that the federal centre will mobilize cameras before it mobilizes pumps. Western policymakers, who have spent the past year recalibrating their approach to the South Caucasus in the wake of the TRIPP framework and Vice President Vance's February 2026 visit to the region, will find that Moscow's regional credibility has eroded slightly further in a part of the Russian Federation where that erosion was supposed to be impossible. As AFPC Senior Fellow Mamuka Tsereteli has argued, the war in Ukraine has produced a paradox for American strategy: it has reduced Russia's long-term strategic power even as it has hardened Moscow into a more risk-tolerant adversary. The window for Western policymakers to lock in this regional shift remains open, but it will not stay open forever. The floodwaters in Dagestan will recede in the coming weeks. The political water table in the Caucasus has shifted by a measurable amount, and it is shifting in the same direction in which the rivers are running, south, away from a centre that no longer commands them.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Laura Linderman is a Senior Fellow and Director of Programs at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the American Foreign Policy Council, and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center. Lydia Sawatsky is a researcher at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.

By Eldaniz Gusseinov, Rassul Kospanov

The Pakistan–Afghanistan war has accelerated Kabul's economic reorientation toward Central Asia, a structural shift that Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have moved most visibly to institutionalize. Less visible, but strategically consequential, is the parallel track that Russia has been constructing through the Republic of Tatarstan. Over the course of 2024 and 2025, Tatarstan has signed memoranda worth US$ 183 million with Afghan private-sector counterparts, doubled bilateral trade to US$ 51 million in the first eleven months of 2025, and prepared a trilateral Russia–Turkmenistan–Afghanistan transport corridor agreement for signature at KazanForum 2026. The pattern suggests that Moscow has delegated a substantial component of its Afghan engagement to a subnational actor as a calibrated instrument of paradiplomacy, a model that carries implications for how external powers compete for position in the emerging trans-Afghan corridor system.

BACKGROUND:

Tatarstan's suitability as Moscow's Afghan channel rests on a combination of confessional, communal, and institutional factors that no other Russian federal subject combines. The republic's Islamic identity provides a register of communication with the Taliban authorities that federal Russian institutions cannot easily replicate. 

Kazan hosts the annual Russia–Islamic World: KazanForum, which since 2023 has carried federal status and functions as one of the few large-format venues where Taliban officials are received. An additional advantage is the presence of a historically established Tatar diaspora in Afghanistan. A notable Tatar community has lived in the country since the nineteenth century, having been formed largely by merchants and trading intermediaries from the Russian Empire who gradually settled in Afghan cities and integrated into local society. 

Today, descendants of this diaspora are concentrated primarily in the northern provinces of Balkh, Samangan, and Baghlan, providing Kazan with an important human infrastructure for engagement that predates the events of 2021. In March 2021, the Afghan government formally recognized "Tatar" as a nationality category in civil documentation, which anchored the community's relationship with Kazan more durably than informal ties had previously allowed.

The institutional architecture developed in parallel. In 2023, a Russian business center affiliated with the Kazan-based Charitable Patriotic Fund of Muslims opened in Kabul. Russia became the first country to open a business representative office in Afghanistan after August 2021. 

Tatarstani firms entered the market before the federal center had resolved the legal status of the Taliban movement, which remained on Russia's list of banned organizations until April 2025, when the Supreme Court suspended the ban and Russia became the first state to formally recognize the government in Kabul. 

During that pre-recognition period, Tatarstan's engagement operated in a space that federal diplomacy could not formally occupy, and the institutional relationships established during those years have persisted after recognition. 

As CEO of the Charitable Patriotic Foundation of Muslims of Russia, Rustam Khabibullin headed the business representative office. Even before the Taliban movement came to power, the patriotic foundation of Muslims had maintained relations with Afghanistan, in particular with Afghans of Tatar origin. Trade volumes reflect the accumulated weight of this engagement. 

Tatarstan–Afghanistan commerce doubled in the first eleven months of 2025 to US$ 51 million, accounting for roughly 10 percent of total Russian–Afghan trade. Tatarstan exports petroleum products, grain, KAMAZ trucks, and specialized equipment; Afghanistan exports dried fruits and minerals. 

In May 2025, Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar led an Afghan delegation to Kazan for meetings with Rais Rustam Minnikhanov and federal ministers. 

In August 2025, a Tatarstani delegation headed by Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Korobchenko travelled to Kabul, the first regional Russian delegation of such standing to visit in the post-2021 period.

IMPLICATIONS:

The paradiplomatic model offers Moscow operational flexibility that formal diplomacy cannot match, even after recognition. Industrial cooperation, equipment supplies, and energy projects can be advanced through Kazan without elevating every transaction to state-to-state protocol. 

The confessional and historical background that Tatarstan brings to the engagement is quite unique. Recognition has regularized the legal environment without altering the functional logic that made Kazan the preferred channel in the first place. 

The federal center has therefore continued to route substantial engagement through the republic rather than absorbing the Afghan file fully into the standard Ministry of Foreign Affairs framework.

This model also has historical precedents. During the Soviet period, Moscow often used Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as showcase republics of the “Soviet East” — modernized Muslim-majority regions meant to demonstrate the compatibility of socialism with development, secular governance, and industrial progress. 

Tashkent in particular hosted Afro-Asian conferences and served as a symbolic bridge to the decolonizing world, while Kazakhstan projected an image of industrial modernity and frontier development. In this sense, the current use of Tatarstan as Russia’s preferred Afghan channel reflects not an innovation, but a revival of an older practice: governing external peripheries through carefully selected internal Muslim intermediaries.

The trilateral Tatarstan–Turkmenistan–Afghanistan transport corridor scheduled for signature at KazanForum 2026 in May represents the most consequential element of this architecture. The route is conceived as an alternative to the International North-South Transport Corridor, whose Iranian segment has been disrupted by regional conflict. 

Nuruddin Azizi, the Afghan Minister of Industry and Trade, has been one of the driving forces behind the project from Afghanistan, and Oleg Korobchenko, Tatarstan's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Industry and Trade, has overseen the Tatarstani component through regular meetings with the Afghan side. First shipments are planned from Tatarstan. Khabibullin has identified Afghanistan as Tatarstan's leading importer of halal-certified goods. In 2024, companies in Tatarstan exported US$ 37 million worth of halal products to Afghanistan. This figure is 20 times higher than in 2023.

If the corridor materializes, it will deepen Russian participation in the trans-Afghan railway architecture that Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have been actively advancing. Uzbekistan's project, which runs from Termez through Mazar-i-Sharif toward South Asian ports via the Salang Pass. Kazakhstan's alternative route, with approximately US$ 500 million committed including a logistics hub in Herat, follows the technically simpler Turgundi–Herat–Kandahar–Spin Boldak corridor across western Afghanistan.

A parallel track runs through Uzbekistan's Surkhandarya region, where the Aritom free economic zone in Termez borders Afghanistan and offers multimodal logistics including rail, road, and river port. At the Russia–Uzbekistan interregional conference held in Termez in autumn 2026, Tatarstani and Surkhandarya officials advanced a cooperation framework covering industrial localization, agro-processing, and transit through Aritom toward Afghan and broader South Asian markets. The Uzbek side has positioned the zone as a 250-million-consumer gateway; Tatarstan's two industrial parks at Chirchik and Jizzakh, where more than half of resident firms are Russian, provide a productive base that can be articulated with the transit infrastructure at Termez. The architecture allows Russian exports to reach Afghan markets either through the Turkmen corridor or through Uzbek infrastructure, which diversifies the operational risk inherent in a single route.

Energy and resource cooperation extends the model further. At the Tatarstan Oil and Gas Chemical Forum, the Taliban's acting Minister of Mines and Petroleum Hedayatullah Badri publicly invited Tatarstani firms to invest in Afghan hydrocarbon projects, while the acting Minister of Energy and Water Resources Abdul Latif Mansur proposed Tatarstani participation in the Panjshir-to-Kabul water transfer project. Memoranda on exploration, extraction, and processing of oil and gas were signed in Kazan in 2025, and KER-Holding has advanced proposals for coal-fired power generation in Afghanistan. This is a role that China lost when its oil extraction project in northern Afghanistan was cancelled, and which Kazakhstan is now beginning to contest through Kazatomprom's and Kazakhmys's exploration activities in Laghman.

The labor migration track, opened in late 2025, adds a further dimension. Kabul has formally proposed directing Afghan labor migrants to Tatarstan, with an initial cohort of approximately 1,000 workers for the agricultural sector and potential expansion across industries. This inverts the direction of the Afghan exodus of the 2021–2024 period and establishes a formal channel through which Afghan labor enters Russia via a subnational agreement, a configuration that the federal labor migration framework has not previously accommodated.

The limits of the model are also visible. Banking infrastructure remains the principal operational constraint. Rustam Khabibullin has publicly identified transaction commissions of approximately 30 percent as a substantial barrier to Russia–Afghanistan commercial settlement and has proposed that Russia develop an international payments system modelled on hawala for transactions with member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Nur Ahmad Agha, the chairman of Da Afghanistan Bank, is expected to attend the first congress of OIC national bank representatives at KazanForum 2026, which has been identified as the venue for this discussion. Without a payments architecture that can absorb Afghan transactions at scale, the trade volumes reported will remain concentrated in a narrow band of fuel, grain, and equipment.

CONCLUSIONS:

Tatarstan's Afghan engagement is neither a humanitarian gesture nor a purely commercial venture. It is the operational layer of Russian policy in a region where the confessional and communal dimensions of the relationship carry weight that standard diplomatic instruments cannot supply. 

Russia's formal recognition of the Taliban government in April 2025 regularized the legal environment without displacing the Tatarstani channel, because the republic's combination of Islamic identity, a diaspora community in northern Afghanistan, an institutional platform in KazanForum, and a productive industrial base constitutes an instrument that no federal subject of Russia could replicate. 

The trilateral corridor agreement prepared for May 2026 and the parallel track through Surkhandarya indicate that the model is scaling from bilateral commerce toward regional transit infrastructure. Whether Tatarstan's engagement consolidates into a durable Russian presence in Afghanistan will depend on the resolution of payment-system constraints and on whether Moscow formalizes the paradiplomatic arrangement through a trade representation in Kabul. 

The broader significance lies in what the case illustrates: in the northward reorientation of Afghanistan that began with the closure of the Pakistani corridor, external powers are not only competing through state-level instruments but through the subnational channels that carry confessional, communal, and industrial advantages.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Eldaniz Gusseinov is Head of Research and сo-founder at the political foresight agency Nightingale Int. and a non-resident research fellow at Haydar Aliyev Center for Eurasian Studies of the Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul. Rassul Kospanov is a Senior Researcher at the National Analytical Center under Nazarbayev University, where he coordinates socio-political research projects and prepares analytical reports and policy recommendations for central and local government bodies. His work focuses on political processes in Kazakhstan and across Central Asia, as well as issues of regional cooperation.