Yerevan has learned to speak the language of peace. Its constitution, army, maps, and television broadcasts still speak another language, and in Baku that second voice is heard more loudly than the first.
On May 28, 2026, Republic Square in Yerevan hosted the first military parade in ten years featuring a display of weaponry. For more than two hours, equipment purchased from seven countries, including France and India, rolled across the pavement, while Armenian-made drones circled above the reviewing stands. Nikol Pashinyan spoke from the podium about peace. Peace, he said, was precisely what the First Republic had lacked in order to preserve its independence. At that very moment, howitzers were passing by.
There is no formal contradiction here. A sovereign country has the right to maintain an army and display it to its citizens, especially nine days before an election. The contradiction appears when one asks a single simple question: against whom?
The overwhelming majority of my compatriots answer that question without hesitation. Emotion and the inertia of a thirty-year war have nothing to do with it. The words of the Armenian prime minister and the actions of the Armenian state are drifting ever farther apart, and every new month brings fresh evidence of that divergence. Below, I will examine it point by point, separating facts from assessments.
Howitzers for Peace: Against Whom Was Yerevan Really Marching?
A defense doctrine is read not through speeches but through procurement. Since 2020, Armenia’s military budget, according to various estimates, has more than doubled. Paris supplied CAESAR self-propelled howitzers, radars, and armored vehicles, while New Delhi sold Pinaka multiple-launch rocket systems and air-defense systems. All of this rolled through Republic Square.
Now let us move around the perimeter of Armenia’s borders. Yerevan has no territorial disputes with Georgia, which also provides Armenia’s only rail connection to the outside world. The Turkish border has been closed since 1993, but in April 2026 Armenian and Turkish officials established a working group in Kars to restore the Kars-Gyumri railway. With Iran, Yerevan spent the entire summer of 2026 drafting a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement.
That leaves Russia. The 102nd Russian military base remains stationed in Gyumri. The country’s gas network belongs to a Gazprom subsidiary, while Armenia’s railways have been under a thirty-year concession to a Russian Railways subsidiary since 2008. States do not buy howitzers to fight a country that has its hand on both the gas valve and the railway switches.
That leaves only one neighbor. The very one with which Yerevan is currently negotiating peace and determining the border.
In Yerevan, they will reply that Armenia needs an army so that it never loses again. That sounds convincing right up to the moment one remembers where exactly the defeat of 2020 occurred: on Azerbaijani land that Armenian forces had held for almost thirty years in defiance of four United Nations Security Council resolutions adopted in 1993. An army created to defend Armenia’s mountain passes buys one kind of weaponry. A revanchist army buys another, and the inventory displayed at the May 28 parade was far closer to the latter category.
Twenty-Nine Percent and Six Missing Seats
On June 7, 2026, Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party received 727,160 votes, or 49.81 percent. Turnout was about 59 percent. Simple arithmetic shows that roughly 29 out of every 100 registered voters cast ballots for the ruling party. The next morning, Pashinyan called the result a historic victory that would ensure Armenia’s eternity and development.
That eternity came with one flaw. The new parliament has 105 seats, of which the ruling party holds 64. Armenia’s constitution requires that a proposal for a new Basic Law be submitted to a referendum only after receiving the support of at least two-thirds of all members of parliament, or 70 lawmakers. Six seats are missing. A popular initiative backed by 200,000 signatures does not change the situation, because the final word still belongs to the same two-thirds majority in parliament. In June, Justice Minister Srbuhi Galyan avoided giving a direct answer when asked how the authorities intended to escape this impasse.
A harsh theory is circulating in Azerbaijani expert circles: the result was supposedly calibrated according to the formula “enough to govern, not enough to change the constitution.” I have no evidence that such manipulation occurred, and I will not present suspicion as fact. The opposition, incidentally, alleges the exact opposite: on the eve of the vote, investigators issued arrest warrants for six candidates from Samvel Karapetyan’s bloc. But no conspiracy theory is needed for the main conclusion.
Arithmetic and political logic are enough. A parliament in which Pashinyan has a majority for any ordinary law but lacks the votes needed for constitutional reform gives him the perfect alibi. The opposition factions of Strong Armenia and Robert Kocharyan’s bloc, holding 29 and 12 seats respectively, do not support the peace agreement in its current form, making agreement with them on a two-thirds majority impossible. The prime minister will be able to shrug for years: I wanted to do it, but they would not let me.
The chronology of excuses looks like this. In March 2025, Pashinyan announced that a referendum on a new constitution would be held in 2027. Eight months later, in November 2025, he explained that the vote would take place after the parliamentary election in order to provide greater legitimacy. The election was held, legitimacy was obtained, but the two-thirds majority never materialized. Every stage produces a new condition, and none of those conditions produces a date.
At the same time, the mathematics of the referendum itself works in the prime minister’s favor. To approve amendments, a majority of participants must vote in favor, and that majority must represent no less than one-quarter of all registered voters, or roughly 625,000 votes. Pashinyan’s own electorate exceeds that threshold by around 100,000. If he seriously wanted to remove the reference to Miatsum from the Basic Law, he could mobilize his base. Instead, he prefers to speak about the state’s “necessary aerodynamics.”
A Lapel Pin and Maps That Are Not in the Agreement
Throughout the election campaign, Pashinyan wore a pin on his jacket in the shape of Armenia’s outline, while at rallies he raised above his head a gold-colored metal map of the country covering 29,743 square kilometers. Western observers applauded: look, Armenia’s leader is publicly renouncing the myth of a “Greater Armenia from sea to sea.” From Baku, that pin looks different.
It fixes in place an outline on which the sides have not agreed. Of the 996 kilometers of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, only one section in Tavush, approximately twelve kilometers long, has been delimited and demarcated, a process completed in 2024. Everything else remains subject to the work of the commissions. In July 2026, Pashinyan said delimitation must proceed strictly through legal means, based on legally binding maps of the Soviet General Staff from 1974 to 1978. Baku’s position is different: the administrative boundaries that existed at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse constitute the legal border, but no single map is granted the status of the sole and final basis. Azerbaijan has not accepted, and will not accept regardless of who proposes it, a formula under which maps from the mid-1970s determine everything.
This is the source of the principal substitution Pashinyan persistently sells to his domestic audience. At home, he interprets mutual recognition of territorial integrity on the basis of the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration as Azerbaijan’s recognition of the line shown on 1975 maps. Yet in April 2026, he himself acknowledged that the parties had no agreement on maps. In other words, the pin on his lapel depicts not a border, but a negotiating position.
A separate issue concerns Lake Goycha, which Armenia calls Sevan. Covering roughly 1,250 square kilometers, it is the largest freshwater reservoir in the South Caucasus. For Azerbaijan, water ceased long ago to be merely an environmental issue: according to official estimates, about 70 percent of the country’s surface-water flow originates outside its borders. When Yerevan demands that a line be fixed that would cut Azerbaijan off from the entire Goycha basin, while the prime minister demonstratively swims in the lake and poses on the peaks of Syunik associated in Armenian patriotic tradition with Andranik Ozanian, the symbolism is read unambiguously in Baku. The owner is showing where the fence runs.
Forty-Three Kilometers That Keep Nakhchivan on a Leash
On August 8, 2025, at the White House, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint declaration, witnessed by Donald Trump. Its central provision was the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, known by its English acronym TRIPP: 43 kilometers of railway, highway, fiber-optic cable, and energy lines through the Meghri district of Syunik.
In January 2026, Yerevan and Washington approved an implementation framework. The route will be built and operated by a company owned 74 percent by the American side and 26 percent by Armenia, with rights granted for 49 years and an option to extend them for another 50. At the September session of the United Nations General Assembly, Pashinyan proudly clarified that if the arrangement is extended, Armenia’s share will rise to 49 percent in the fiftieth year without any additional investment. Azerbaijan’s share in this entire structure is zero.
Baku points out that during the Soviet era the Meghri section operated as part of the Azerbaijan Railway and connected the country’s mainland with Nakhchivan. Under the new arrangement, Azerbaijan will be able to use this line on the terms of an American-Armenian company and under Armenian jurisdiction. Add the unresolved question of the Russian concession over Armenia’s railways, which runs until 2038, and the picture becomes clear: the route will have many stakeholders, and Yerevan will remain one of the key ones.
Armenia is holding on to this leverage for an understandable reason. Nakhchivan, cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan, remains vulnerable. The autonomous republic covers approximately 5,500 square kilometers and has a population of more than 450,000, while today the only land route to it runs through Iran. On March 5, 2026, a drone struck Nakhchivan; Baku pointed to Iran, while Tehran denied involvement. Vulnerability ceased to be theoretical.
Whoever controls these 43 kilometers controls the switchboard for Azerbaijan’s shortest overland connection with Turkey and, beyond that, with the Middle Corridor linking China and Europe. Opponents of Turkic integration, from Tehran to Moscow, understand perfectly well what such a switchboard is worth. An Armenia capable of delaying construction, approvals, or customs procedures at the right moment is more valuable to them than an Armenia that simply lets trains pass.
As of spring 2026, not a single meter of track had been laid on the Armenian section. According to available estimates, construction of the railway will require at least 18 months after work begins, while major contracting tenders are not expected before the end of 2026. Azerbaijan, by contrast, has committed to bringing its own lines to the Armenian border by early 2027. My forecast is that regular freight traffic through the Armenian section of TRIPP will not begin before the end of 2028.
A Public Quarrel, Gold Through the Back Door
Moscow and Yerevan quarrel loudly and willingly. In February 2024, Armenia froze its participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization. In 2025, parliament adopted a law launching the process of seeking European Union membership. In May 2026, the Eurasian Economic Union discussed suspending Armenia’s membership. On June 1, Russia’s agricultural watchdog banned imports of Armenian fish from nearly all producers. It looks like the perfect divorce.
The money tells another story. According to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk, bilateral trade in 2024 totaled $12.4 billion, while Armenia’s gross domestic product was about $26 billion, meaning the value of trade was equivalent to nearly half the size of the Armenian economy. Economists are right to add a qualification: trade turnover and gross domestic product cannot be compared as part and whole, because gross domestic product measures added value while trade turnover measures the value of transactions. That does not change the order of magnitude.
The origin of that figure can be seen clearly in customs statistics. In 2024, Armenia imported $7.4 billion worth of precious metals and stones and exported $8 billion worth, accounting for roughly half of the country’s total foreign trade turnover of $30.2 billion. The negligible difference between imports and exports shows that the republic functioned as a transit gateway: Russian gold moved through Armenian banks and refining facilities to the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong. At the same time, Western automobiles and electronics traveled through Armenia to Russia under Eurasian Economic Union rules. Official Armenian exports rose from $3 billion in 2021 to $13.1 billion in 2024.
Fairness requires acknowledging that the figure of “45 to 50 percent of gross domestic product” describes 2024. In 2025, turnover nearly halved, falling to $6.7 billion over eleven months, while from January through May 2026 it totaled about $2.2 billion. The main reason was Moscow’s own decision in April 2024 to abolish its export duty on gold, thereby eliminating the economic rationale for the Armenian route. Curiously, Sergei Lavrov cited a very different figure in January 2026, putting trade turnover at $14 billion, and the discrepancy between the official estimates of the two capitals is revealing in itself.
Even after the decline, Russia remains Armenia’s largest trading partner, accounting for between 28 and 35 percent of turnover. The base in Gyumri, the gas network, and the railway have not disappeared. A loud political quarrel combined with a quiet business partnership benefits both sides: Yerevan gains Western sympathy, while Moscow retains leverage that no one demands be dismantled.
Against this background, Azerbaijani gasoline deserves attention. On December 19, 2025, 22 tank cars carrying 1,300 tons of SOCAR-produced premium gasoline arrived in Armenia. In the first half of 2026, Armenia imported $17.8 million worth of Azerbaijani petroleum products, while Pashinyan personally boasted that fuel prices had fallen by as much as 15 percent, from 510 to 430 drams per liter. In July, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev described these supplies as a significant contribution to Armenia’s energy security. More than 40,000 tons of transit cargo destined for Armenia has already crossed Azerbaijani territory. Armenian exports in the opposite direction, to Azerbaijan, remain at zero.
Baku made a gesture that every Armenian driver could feel. A reciprocal gesture would cost Yerevan not a single dram: publicly state that Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which prohibits most American assistance to Azerbaijan, is outdated and should be repealed. American presidents have waived it annually since 2002, most recently when Trump did so in August 2025, but the provision itself remains in force, and the Armenian lobby in Congress fights every such waiver. Pashinyan has never asked Congress to repeal the amendment. Silence here is also a position.
The Albanian Nerve: Why the Monastery Dispute Erupted Now
On September 11 and 12, 2026, diplomats accredited in Baku visited Karabakh and East Zangezur, including the Gandzasar and Khudavang monasteries. Hikmet Hajiyev, Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan, told them that Karabakh was, is, and will remain the cultural heart of Azerbaijan. Armenia erupted. Pashinyan called Azerbaijan’s interpretation of history unacceptable, newly elected parliamentary speaker Ruben Rubinyan issued sharp statements, and television channels spent a week discussing little else.
The intense reaction to a visit that changed no borders is understandable. The dispute over Albanian heritage is not really about history. It concerns the ideological foundation of Miatsum. The entire construct of a “historical right” to Karabakh rests on the claim that the region’s Christian monuments were originally and exclusively Armenian, and therefore that Armenians are indigenous while Azerbaijanis are newcomers. Once one acknowledges that these churches were built by Caucasian Albania, an independent Christian state with its own alphabet and church, the foundation begins to crack.
The facts of Albanian history were documented long before the current conflict. The Albanian Catholicosate existed until 1836, when an imperial Russian decree abolished it and subordinated its parishes to Eçmiədzin; from that point began the systematic “Gregorianization” of Albanian heritage. Armenian scholarship and a significant portion of Western academic literature describe these monasteries as Armenian, and that debate should continue in universities, archives, and conferences. The problem is different: in the middle of the peace process, Yerevan turns an academic dispute into a state position and portrays a diplomatic visit across sovereign Azerbaijani territory as a provocation.
On September 14, the Azerbaijani Peace Bridge initiative group expressed disappointment at the hostile tone of Armenian media coverage and public discussion. It is telling that Armenia reacted more painfully to the diplomats’ visit than to any military exercise. A state that has genuinely renounced its claims remains calm about who shows which monasteries to visiting guests on someone else’s territory.
By Bus to Shusha Today, by Tank Tomorrow
The Peace Bridge initiative was launched in November 2025 with the support of the two governments. Meetings were held in Tsaghkadzor in February 2026 and in Gabala on April 10 through 12. During the latter round, the Armenian delegation crossed the border through the delimited section for the first time, undergoing passport control and receiving entry stamps. The symbolism was impressive.
Then came the television appearances. One voice in Armenian public discourse put it this way: today he could travel to Shusha by bus, but when the opportunity came he would go there by tank; Azerbaijan first needed to be calmed down and then deceived. What troubles me in that sentence is not the tank. What is alarming is deception being proposed as a method for future relations.
Ruben Babayan, artistic director of the Yerevan Puppet Theater and a participant in the Gabala round, according to a widely circulated recording of an Armenian television broadcast, compared Azerbaijan to a dog that must be petted until the muzzle is ready. Finding an equally zoological metaphor in response would not be difficult. There is no need. Azerbaijan is not a dog, Armenia is not one either, states are not animals, and diplomacy is not animal training. The meaning of the statement, however, is transparent: if friendliness toward a neighbor is necessary only until the muzzle is prepared, then the tactic has changed, not the substance.
A third Armenian participant in the same initiative spoke more honestly and calmly: normal relations would not be achieved in his generation, and the most that could be accomplished was to stop shooting at one another. For two societies that have only recently emerged from war, that assessment sounds sober, and I respect it. The question nevertheless arises as to how someone with that time horizon defines his mission in a project whose stated goal is mutual understanding and trust. A ceasefire is the zero point of peace, not its final result.
Sincerity should be measured not by photographs against the backdrop of Baku’s Old City and not by the restaurants where the guests dined. Trust is measured by the words spoken after returning to Yerevan. I am not calling for Armenian participants to be selected on the basis of agreement with Baku; that would strip any dialogue of meaning. Let people with hardline positions and difficult questions come. The dividing line lies elsewhere: between those who sit at the table to understand their neighbor and those who sit down to study ways to deceive that neighbor. The first is called dialogue. The second is not usually named openly in public discourse, and people who hold such views have no place on the Peace Bridge. If Yerevan is sincere, the list of Armenian participants will have to be reconsidered.
Nzhdeh on a Pedestal: The Submerged Part of the Iceberg
Military defeat swept away the visible portion of three decades of Armenian policy: an army on someone else’s land, a separatist regime, and a “line of defense.” The submerged part remained. The ideology, propaganda, historical concepts, and legal framework that sustained the previous course are still in place.
Take Garegin Nzhdeh. The author of the Tseghakron doctrine, literally “race-religion,” collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and participated in the formation of Armenian units within the Wehrmacht. In May 2016, a monument to him was unveiled in central Yerevan, and a subway station bears his name. Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued an official protest at the time. No Armenian government, including the current one, has condemned this ideology at the state level. Try to imagine a monument to a collaborator in the center of Berlin or Warsaw.
The legal framework is structured the same way. Armenia’s Declaration of Independence of August 23, 1990, refers to the joint decision adopted on December 1, 1989, by the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and the National Council of Nagorno-Karabakh concerning “reunification.” The preamble of the current constitution is based on the fundamental principles of that declaration. Around it stands an entire body of parliamentary resolutions, subordinate legislation, school curricula, and maps of “historical Armenia,” every line of which reinforces the idea of lost lands.
Pashinyan himself speaks of the need to move from “historical Armenia” to “real Armenia,” and half of his domestic opposition hates him for that formula. I acknowledge that rhetorically he has gone further than any of his predecessors. But rhetoric does not repeal a constitutional preamble, remove a monument, or rewrite a textbook.
The Lessons of Moscow 1990 and Dublin 1998
Advocates of a “soft” approach like to say that Baku’s demands are unprecedented. That claim is incorrect, and history offers at least two precise precedents.
The first is Germany. On September 12, 1990, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed in Moscow. Unified Germany confirmed the finality of its borders, renounced all future territorial claims, and undertook to bring its Basic Law into conformity with that renunciation. Article 23, which had allowed “other parts of Germany” to accede to the Federal Republic, was removed from the constitution. The Bundeswehr was limited to 370,000 personnel, and Germany renounced weapons of mass destruction. Article 26 of the Basic Law had already declared, since 1949, that preparing a war of aggression was unconstitutional and punishable by law.
Before that came denazification, a process that lasted for decades. The Nuremberg Tribunal operated from November 1945 until October 1946. On April 16, 1945, acting on orders from the American military command, roughly one thousand residents of Weimar were marched through the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp so they could see with their own eyes what they had supposedly “known nothing about.” Willy Brandt fell to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in December 1970, twenty-five years after the war. A nation does not heal quickly, but healing always begins with institutions, not moods.
The second precedent is Ireland. After the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998, Irish voters went to the polls on May 22 to amend Articles 2 and 3 of the constitution, which had contained a territorial claim to Northern Ireland. The amendments received 94.4 percent support. A claim sanctified by decades of national mythology disappeared from the constitution in a single day because the country’s political class decided that peace was worth more than myth.
Compressed into a single formula, the sequence looks like this: military defeat, dismantling of the old ideology, changes to the constitution and laws, revision of the historical narrative, acknowledgment of responsibility, apologies and trials, limitation of revanchist potential, transformation of public consciousness, and finally economic integration. Armenia is stuck between the first and second stages. Responsibility has already been partially established: trials of former leaders of the separatist regime have been underway in Baku since 2025. Inside Armenia itself, meanwhile, there has not even been a discussion about those whose hands are stained with blood.
Can all of this be expected to happen voluntarily? The experience of Germany and Japan suggests otherwise. Ireland reached its referendum after thirty years of violence. Voluntary action in such processes is always reinforced by external circumstances, and Azerbaijan has enough such leverage: transit, fuel, TRIPP construction deadlines, signature of the peace agreement, and Ankara’s position, which explicitly links normalization with Armenia to the signing of peace with Baku. Azerbaijan’s military capability requires no demonstration; the region witnessed it very recently. That is precisely why pressure should be applied through economics, deadlines, and conditions, while force should remain in the background as something everyone remembers.
What Yerevan Will Say in Response, and Where It Is Right
An honest analysis must hear the other side. Armenian critics will say that Yerevan has already recognized Karabakh as Azerbaijani, initialed a 17-article peace agreement, agreed to the mutual withdrawal of cases from international courts, and consented to the dissolution of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group. All of that is true, and these steps cost Pashinyan enormous political capital.
They will say that Armenia needs an army after the border fighting of 2021 and 2022 in Syunik and Gegharkunik, which Yerevan describes as an incursion into Armenian territory. Azerbaijan interprets those events differently, as a response to provocations along an undelimited boundary, but the fact that fighting took place helps explain Armenian fears. They will point to the concept of the return of Azerbaijanis to Western Azerbaijan and call it mirror-image irredentism. The distinction is fundamental: Baku speaks of the right of people to return to the places from which they were expelled in 1987 through 1991, not of changing the sovereign status of territories. That discussion, too, must take place calmly and within the framework of law.
Finally, they will say that Karabakh’s cultural heritage requires protection. I agree: every form of heritage, Albanian, Armenian, or Muslim, requires protection, and Azerbaijan, which is rebuilding Aghdam and Fuzuli after years of destruction during the occupation, understands the price of this issue better than most.
The main counterargument concerns Pashinyan himself: he really has gone further than any Armenian leader before him. Criticizing him simply for not having done enough misses the point. The problem is the double-entry bookkeeping under which international platforms hear the language of “real Armenia,” while at home the legal and symbolic infrastructure of Miatsum remains intact because that is more convenient for the next election. A peace built on double-entry bookkeeping will collapse with the first change of power in Yerevan.
Peace with a Checklist
It is time to turn the concept of healing Armenian politics into a plan with benchmarks and deadlines; otherwise, it will remain elegant political commentary. Progress can be measured through specific, verifiable criteria. Has a referendum date been set, and has a draft constitution been published without a reference to the 1990 Declaration? Has a decision been made regarding the Nzhdeh monument and the name of the subway station? Have school textbooks and maps been revised? Has the composition of the Armenian participants in Peace Bridge been reconsidered? Has Yerevan publicly declared Section 907 outdated? Has a construction schedule for the Meghri section been announced with dates rather than promises?
Each point is either completed or it is not. No aerodynamics.
My forecast is formulated so that it can be tested. There will be no referendum on a new Armenian constitution before December 31, 2027, and the opposition, Russia, and the “unpreparedness of society” will be blamed. The peace agreement will not be signed by that date either. A train from Horadiz to Nakhchivan will not pass through the Armenian section before the end of 2028. I will be glad to be wrong.
For now, all the actual peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia fits into twelve kilometers of the Tavush section, where in April the Armenian participants in Peace Bridge handed their passports to border guards and received entry stamps. The remaining 984 kilometers of the border are still drawn only on the pin Nikol Pashinyan wears on his lapel.