By Mathieu Lemoine

Armenia’s June 2026 parliamentary elections were not only a contest over government formation. It was a test of whether democratic politics can provide legitimacy for a painful post-Karabakh recalibration. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won 49.81 percent of the vote, enough to continue governing, but not the two-thirds majority required to initiate constitutional change on its own. The result strengthens Pashinyan’s mandate to pursue peace with Azerbaijan and diversify Armenia’s foreign policy, but it does not remove the structural pressures shaping the South Caucasus.

BACKGROUND:

The election was Armenia’s first parliamentary vote since Azerbaijan’s 2023 takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh and the displacement of its Armenian population. It followed years of declining confidence in Russia’s security guarantees, growing Armenian engagement with the EU and the U.S., and a difficult peace process with Azerbaijan. The campaign therefore unfolded at the intersection of domestic legitimacy, post-war trauma and regional realignment.

Civil Contract’s victory confirmed that Armenian voters were not prepared to return the pre-2018 political elite to power. It also showed that Russia-oriented opposition forces, despite mobilizing dissatisfaction over Karabakh and Pashinyan’s concessions, could not convert that discontent into a governing majority. Strong Armenia received 23.29 percent of the vote, while the Armenia Alliance also remained well behind the ruling party, leaving Civil Contract with a clear lead and the ability to form a government. At the same time, the vote should not be read as a simple plebiscite on “the West.” Pashinyan campaigned on peace, sovereignty and a more balanced foreign policy, not on a clean rupture with Russia.

From an electoral perspective, the process mattered because Armenia’s foreign policy shift depends on the government’s ability to claim democratic legitimacy. International observers assessed the vote as competitive and generally well administered, while also noting a confrontational campaign environment and external pressure. Reuters also reported concerns over selective justice linked to prosecutions and arrests of opposition figures before the vote. This combination is important. The election produced a usable mandate, but not an uncontested political consensus.

IMPLICATIONS:

The first implication is that an electoral mandate is not a peace settlement. Pashinyan can now argue that voters endorsed continuity: negotiations with Azerbaijan, normalization with Türkiye and strategic diversification away from overdependence on Russia. Yet the most difficult questions remain outside the immediate reach of an ordinary parliamentary majority. Azerbaijan has demanded that Armenia amend its constitution to remove what Baku regards as an implicit reference to Nagorno-Karabakh. Pashinyan’s party did not secure the parliamentary strength needed to call a constitutional referendum on its own. This creates a gap between electoral legitimacy and constitutional capacity.

That gap will shape the next phase of negotiations. The Armenian government can continue talks, but it cannot easily present constitutional change as a purely technical step. For many Armenians, Karabakh is not only a legal issue but a national trauma. Any move perceived as closing the historical and political question of Karabakh will be vulnerable to opposition mobilization. In this sense, the election authorized a direction, but not every concession that may be required to complete it.

The second implication concerns Azerbaijan’s leverage. The vote strengthened the Armenian government domestically, but it did not alter the asymmetry created by Azerbaijan’s military advantage since 2020 and 2023. Border incidents and reports of renewed ceasefire violations, particularly around sensitive areas such as Syunik, show that negotiations continue under pressure rather than in a neutral environment. This matters because the unresolved implementation of transit arrangements, including the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, leaves room for competing interpretations over sovereignty, customs, security and access between Azerbaijan proper and Nakhchivan.

Armenia can endorse connectivity as part of a peace agenda. Indeed, Pashinyan’s “Crossroads of Peace” logic depends on turning Armenia from a blockaded state into a regional connector. But if transit arrangements remain ambiguous or delayed, connectivity can also become a source of coercion. Syunik is not only a transport question. It is Armenia’s southern link to Iran, a sensitive zone in Azerbaijani-Turkish strategy, and a red line for Tehran. This is why the regional significance of Armenia’s election lies less in the result itself than in whether the government can convert its mandate into enforceable arrangements that preserve Armenian sovereignty while enabling regional trade.

The third implication is that Russia’s role is weakened but not eliminated. Moscow’s credibility as Armenia’s security patron has been severely damaged since 2020 and 2023, a reassessment reflected in Pashinyan’s own statement that Armenia’s reliance on Russia for security had been a “strategic mistake.” During the election campaign, Russian pressure appeared not only as geopolitical rhetoric but as a factor in the electoral environment: observers cited public threats and trade pressure, while media reporting also pointed to information operations aimed at influencing the vote. That is precisely why the Armenian case is instructive for the wider post-Soviet space: external influence no longer operates only through formal alliances, military bases or economic dependence. It also works through the campaign environment, information space, diaspora networks and the use of economic vulnerability.

The election showed that Russian pressure can be politically counterproductive. It did not prevent Pashinyan’s victory and may have reinforced his claim to be defending Armenian sovereignty. But Russia retains tools that can complicate Armenia’s post-election trajectory. Armenia remains economically exposed to Russia through trade, energy, labor migration and remittances. It also remains formally entangled in Russian-led institutions, even as the political basis for that alignment erodes. The region is therefore not simply becoming “post-Russian.” It is becoming less ordered, less predictable and more coercive.

The fourth implication concerns the West. The EU, the U.S. and several European states have more room to support Armenia after the election. Western political backing can strengthen Armenia’s institutional resilience, reduce isolation and support negotiations. But political support is not the same as hard security guarantees. Armenia’s strategic problem is not that it has chosen one patron over another. It is that the old patron has lost legitimacy, while no new actor is prepared to replace it as a security guarantor.

This creates a difficult policy environment for Yerevan. Armenia must deepen cooperation with Western partners without provoking expectations that cannot be met. It must maintain relations with Iran without undermining its Western outreach. It must manage Russia without returning to dependency. And it must negotiate with Azerbaijan from a weaker position while persuading Armenian society that peace is not capitulation. Elections can legitimize this course, but they cannot substitute for a security architecture.

For the South Caucasus, the broader lesson is that the regional order is moving beyond Russian-centered conflict management without yet acquiring a stable replacement. Azerbaijan is more powerful. Türkiye is more central. Iran is defensive about corridor politics and border changes. Russia is weakened but still disruptive. Western actors are more present but cautious. In this environment, Armenia’s election is regionally significant because it tested whether democratic legitimacy can support a small state’s strategic adaptation under pressure.

CONCLUSIONS:

Armenia’s election should not be interpreted only as a geopolitical choice between Russia and the West. It is better understood as a case of democratic mandate under strategic constraint. Pashinyan now has renewed legitimacy to pursue peace, normalization and diversification. Yet this legitimacy does not by itself resolve the constitutional question, Azerbaijan’s leverage, Russian coercive tools, uncertainty over transit arrangements, or the lack of enforceable Western security guarantees.

The vote therefore clarifies Armenia’s direction but not its destination. It gives the government political authority to continue, but the durability of that authority will depend on whether peace and connectivity produce tangible security rather than new vulnerabilities. If Armenia can translate electoral legitimacy into a credible settlement, stronger institutions and diversified partnerships, the 2026 election may become a turning point in the South Caucasus. If not, it may be remembered as a mandate that clarified the country’s intentions without resolving the regional pressures surrounding them.

The central lesson extends beyond Armenia. In a fragmented South Caucasus, elections can authorize strategic change, but they cannot replace security architecture. Democratic legitimacy is a necessary resource for Armenia’s post-Karabakh recalibration. It is not, on its own, a guarantee that the region will become more stable.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Mathieu Lemoine is a governance, rule of law and public sector reform professional with experience across UNDP, USAID, OSCE, EU institutions and election observation missions. He has worked extensively on governance, elections, civil society and regional dynamics in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus.

By Stephen Blank

The Pakistan-Afghanistan war, on top of the war against Iran, is forcing Moscow to attempt to balance its security and economic interests in and beyond Central Asia with both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan is critical to Russia because it provides an alternative to Iran, allowing Moscow’s transcontinental trade project INSTC to move forward and offering a gateway to Asia. Concurrently, Moscow has upgraded its ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan both to deter ISIS-K terrorists and to secure broader geostrategic aims. Yet it also increasingly appears that Moscow is willing to offer Afghanistan arms, ostensibly to deter terrorists. However, in the broader regional context, this move underscores Moscow’s propensity for playing a double game with and against its partners.

BACKGROUND:

The Iran war and Pakistan’s war with Afghanistan threaten the further erosion of Russian influence in Central Asia. Consequently, Russia has embarked on what can only be called a double game vis-à-vis Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan has attacked Afghanistan because it claims Afghanistan harbors the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorist group, which performs attacks against Pakistan. This complaint is more than a little ironic given Pakistan’s own long-standing and well-known record of sponsoring terrorism against India.  More significant, however, is the fact that this charge, if true, signifies that Kabul has escaped Islamabad’s tutelage. However, the war also disrupts Russia’s ambition to sell Russian gas to South and Southeast Asia through pipelines traversing Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

At the same time, Russia has steadily built a “full-fledged” and “pragmatic” partnership with Afghanistan to prevent it from sponsoring terrorist groups like ISIS-K and their targeting of Russia and Central Asia, where Russia still claims to be the ultimate security manager.  According to Sergei Shoigu, Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, full-fledged partnership includes bilateral defense and security cooperation. Indeed, Shoigu openly proclaimed Russia’s opposition to any third-party military presence in Afghanistan or neighboring countries, a shot across both Pakistan’s and the U.S.’s bow and a sign of its ambition to establish a protectorate over Afghanistan.

However, Russia’s interests transcend defense. The war against Iran has ruptured the feasibility of Russia’s, Iran’s and India’s major transit, trade and connectivity route through Central Asia and then through Russia to Europe, the INSTC (multi-modal International North-South Transportation Corridor). The other existing corridor, the increasingly lucrative Middle Corridor or TITR (Trans-Caspian International Transport Route) from China to Central Asia and then to the Caucasus and Europe bypasses Russia. Thus, since failure to find an alternative to Iran for INSTC will have dire geoeconomic and geopolitical consequences for Russia, it has turned to Pakistan for help. Pakistan cannot afford exclusion from transcontinental trade routes and has agreed to explore connecting its port at Gwadar either by land or by sea to INSTC.

IMPLICATIONS:

Moscow typically has sought to have a foot in both camps in every conflict scenario throughout the Global South and the Pakistan-Afghan war is no exception. But this case is far more central to Moscow’s interests than its power projection in for example Africa or the Middle East. In order to maintain its self-appointed “leading position” in Central Asia, it is crucial for Russia to exercise leverage over Afghanistan to deter an outbreak of Islamic terrorism targeting either Central Asia or Russia.

Likewise, it is critical to Russia’s economic health and continuing ability to finance its war against Ukraine and its heavily strained state budget that it continues to find Asian markets for its oil and gas. Doing so also entails developing trade routes like INSTC to Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia, especially given its desire to be acknowledged as an independent Asian power. Therefore, balancing between Pakistan and Afghanistan while developing alternatives to Iran’s connectivity have become requirements of Russian policies to realize vital Russian interests, especially as its economy is reeling and its position in Central Asia erodes.

Further erosion is inevitable if Islamic terrorism “migrates” to Central Asia without Moscow being able to deter or stop it. By the same token, exclusion from transcontinental trade routes will undermine Moscow’s ideological and rhetorical pretense of hegemony, and demonstrate that Russia lacks the means in terms of tangible material capability to back up its arguments or sustain a position that answers to Central Asia’s most pressing questions, i.e. economic development.

Concurrently, if Russia cannot develop let alone sustain viable, economically justifiable outreach to South and Southeast Asia, its hard-won influence and standing in those countries will diminish by an order of magnitude, negating its claims of being an Asian power and making it still more dependent on China.

Despite its vital need to keep the balance between Pakistan and Afghanistan, many recent reports suggest that Moscow is secretly negotiating an arms deal with the Taliban. Ostensibly, the aim would be to use the weapons to suppress ISIS-K and prevent further terrorist strikes in Central Asia and or Russia. While this makes sense if leveraging Russia’s Central Asian position and ambitions vis-à-vis Afghanistan are the priority; in reality, it highlights the priority of security over economic development in Russian policy.  It also illustrates the abiding temptation to make secret deals involving the security services or force structures as primary instruments of foreign policy.

Given the Taliban’s track record, it is unlikely that it can or will hold up its end of the bargain. Moreover, should these reports be true this news will enrage Pakistan and likely torpedo efforts to have it join INSTC. That trade project, unlike the Middle Corridor, never got off the ground and is therefore already being eclipsed. This has gravely serious and negative implications for Russia and is likely to aggravate all the trends making for the decline of Russian power in the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as South and Southeast Asia. 

An arms deal with the Taliban will further entrench the belief among governments who monitor Russian behavior that Moscow is cannot be relied on as a partner. It will also confirm the notion held by many Western governments that Russia, like the Soviet Union, remains a sponsor of state terrorism and must, at best, be kept at arm’s length.

CONCLUSIONS:

Thus Russia continues to play a double game towards its partners, attempting to have both an empire and prosperous foreign trade relations, even though their logics are quite incompatible. Moscow also has yet to grasp that it cannot denounce and support terrorism at the same time without paying an incommensurate price for its quest after short-term gains. In Central Asia, Russia still seeks to pursue wildly contradictory aims without paying the price for doing so. If Moscow does, in fact, arm the Afghan government, it will once again be playing with dynamite.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, www.fpri.org.

By Joseph Epstein

On June 7, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won the country’s parliamentary elections with just under 50 percent of the vote, enough under Armenia’s electoral system to govern alone with a comfortable majority. The nearest challenger, the Strong Armenia bloc fronted by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, trailed near 23 percent, and every opposition force that cleared the threshold campaigned on some version of repairing ties with Moscow. Civil Contract cast the vote as a choice between a return to Russia’s orbit and a more independent Armenia drawn toward the West, and the electorate sided with the latter. Yet the win alone will not seal Armenia’s fate. The country must still pass the constitutional change widely seen as the final barrier to normalization with Azerbaijan and Turkey, and Pashinyan’s victory does not mean Russia will quietly concede a country it has dominated for two centuries.

BACKGROUND:

Armenia under Pashinyan has moved steadily away from Russia, above all since the 2020 defeat to Azerbaijan in the Second Karabakh War, a forty-four-day conflict that cost Yerevan roughly three-quarters of the territory Armenian forces had held since the early 1990s. The remainder of Karabakh fell in September 2023, when Azerbaijan retook the enclave and more than one hundred thousand ethnic Armenians fled. Out of that collapse Pashinyan built the vision he calls “Real Armenia” versus “Historic Armenia”: the argument that unless the country relinquishes irredentist claims on its neighbors, it will never enjoy genuine independence.

Pashinyan is often cast as the ideological successor to Armenia’s first president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who late in his tenure pushed for a settlement with Azerbaijan to end Armenia’s isolation and strip Russia of its ability to leverage the conflict. He warned, almost prophetically, that Armenia would one day be forced to ask for what it was then rejecting and would not receive it, “as it has happened more than once in our history.” That push cost him his office and triggered the rise of the Karabakh-born politicians who ruled until the Velvet Revolution brought Pashinyan to power in 2018. Ter-Petrosyan was right too early, and Armenia paid for it in 2020.

Pashinyan, who early in his premiership pushed for unification with Karabakh, reversed course entirely after the war, concluding that the only way forward was a deal with the stronger party. That trajectory produced the breakthrough of August 8, 2025, when Trump hosted Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the White House, where the two leaders initialed a peace agreement and committed to a U.S.-brokered connectivity project across southern Armenia.

One obstacle remains, and it is constitutional. Armenia’s constitution, through a preamble invoking the 1990 Declaration of Independence and, with it, the 1989 act of “reunification” with Karabakh, still carries an implicit claim to territory that the entire international community—Armenia included—recognizes as Azerbaijani, and over which Baku reestablished full control in 2023. Removing that language is less an Azerbaijani demand than a load-bearing element of the peace process itself: so long as a founding document lays claim to a neighbor’s recognized land, the conflict cannot be considered definitively closed.

IMPLICATIONS:

The step is not the aberration its critics suggest. Other democracies have rewritten founding texts to settle territorial disputes: Ireland surrendered its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland by referendum in 1998 under the Good Friday Agreement, and a reunifying Germany renounced its claims east of the Oder-Neisse line to normalize relations with Poland. What makes Armenia’s case hard is procedure and politics, not principle. Its Constitutional Court has ruled the preamble immutable, so the only path is an entirely new constitution, ratified by national referendum. Civil Contract has the votes, and a draft shorn of the preamble was finalized in March 2026. The referendum, expected around 2027, is the real test, and Pashinyan’s task is to sell it at home as the completion of the peace rather than a capitulation to it. Clear that hurdle, and Armenia gains overland access to Europe and Central Asia.

Moscow, however, will not concede, and recent reporting shows how much it was willing to spend even as its war in Ukraine strained its resources. OCCRP traced an influence operation, through leaked documents, to Russia’s Social Design Agency—already sanctioned in Washington, London, and Brussels—working under the direction of the Presidential Administration. The agency ran a dedicated outlet aimed at Armenian dual citizens living in Russia, a bloc its own planning documents called potentially decisive, blending fabricated scandals with AI-generated content. The Insider identified the officials managing the Armenia portfolio and the officers dispatched to Yerevan, alongside a plan to bus Russian Armenians in to swing the result.

The influence campaign ran in parallel with economic coercion. At an April Kremlin meeting, Putin told Pashinyan that Armenia could not belong to both the EU and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, citing discounted gas as leverage. Moscow then restricted imports of Armenian produce, flowers, mineral water, and alcohol on pretextual grounds and threatened to scrap the 2013 agreement guaranteeing duty-free gas, oil, and diamonds. At the Union’s summit in Astana in late May, Putin invoked the “Ukrainian scenario” and demanded that Yerevan choose. Armenia’s own history supplies a darker warning: in October 1999, gunmen stormed the National Assembly and killed Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan and Speaker Karen Demirchyan, whose reformist coalition had just sidelined then-President Kocharyan, who consolidated power in the aftermath—a reminder that an inconvenient reform government can be removed by means other than the ballot box. Russia retains real leverage over Armenia’s economy and a meaningful share of its population, and it has now demonstrated its capacity to run sophisticated active measures inside the country.

Against that pressure, U.S. engagement has been unprecedented. In February, JD Vance became the first sitting U.S. vice president to visit Armenia, advancing a civil nuclear deal and offering Yerevan a place in a U.S.-led critical minerals bloc. In late May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a strategic partnership charter and the corridor framework in Yerevan, and days later Trump issued his “complete and total endorsement” of Pashinyan—the first time a U.S. president has openly backed a leader squarely within Russia’s traditional sphere. The centerpiece is the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), a roughly twenty-seven-mile corridor through Armenia’s Syunik province that would link the main body of Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave and onward to Turkey, built and operated by a development company in which the U.S. holds 74 percent for an initial forty-nine-year term. Passage of the constitutional change would give Washington its strongest position in the South Caucasus since independence and, through TRIPP, a chokepoint of the Middle Corridor just as securing non-Chinese supply lines for critical minerals has become a first-order priority.

CONCLUSIONS:

Armenia’s voters made the choice Civil Contract asked of them and handed the U.S. a strategic opening that did not exist a year ago. But an election is not a settlement. The referendum still lies ahead, carrying a real chance of failure, and Russia has shown it will spend, subvert, and coerce to keep Armenia within its grip; it will not stop because one vote went against it. For Washington, the work is beginning rather than ending. The endorsements and signing ceremonies were the easy part. Converting them into a durable foothold means seeing the constitutional process through, hardening Armenia against the next wave of Russian active measures, and breaking ground on TRIPP before the window closes. Pashinyan has staked his country’s future on the West, and the U.S. has every reason, and a narrowing amount of time, to ensure that bet pays off.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.