Under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia has regularly discussed scaling back its traditionally close ties with Russia. Each time, Moscow could have pointed out that trade volumes were stable, military cooperation continued, and the Kremlin remained an arbiter in Armenia’s dispute with Azerbaijan over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh. These arguments became meaningless when Azerbaijan seized Nagorno-Karabakh following a one-day war in 2023. Now Armenians are no longer interested in whether Russia is a reliable partner or not: they know the answer to that question. Instead, they’re asking what the Kremlin could do if they began seriously looking westward.
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