Elections in Armenia: Russia will definitely leave the South Caucasus

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June 7 is perhaps one of the most important days for the future of what remains of the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin turned the seemingly trivial parliamentary elections in Armenia into a real battle – with threats, product bans and a landing of Russian residents with Armenian passports to support the party of a Russian businessman without an Armenian passport. Some complete trash – but that’s always the case with Putin!

However, if you look closely at the historical context, it will be obvious how important control over the South Caucasus is for the master of the Kremlin. It has somehow been erased from our memory that the events in the Soviet Union, if we talk about public movements in the union republics, actually began not with Lithuania, but with Armenia. With the “Karabakh” committee.

And here’s what’s important: the KGB gladly exploited the mood that prevailed in society at the time, the feeling of injustice due to the fact that the territory with the Armenian majority is part of Azerbaijan and that someone from the outside wants to change the territory of Azerbaijan in order to literally push the peoples against each other and thus build an ideal trap for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians – and in addition to contributing to the destabilization of the situation in the Soviet Union and demonstrating the ineffectiveness and helplessness of the party leadership.

When the communist empire finally collapsed and people from the KGB (now the FSB) began to climb to power in Russia, the doors of the Caucasian mousetrap remained firmly closed. Moreover, when the new president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, himself a former head of the KGB of the Azerbaijani SSR, made an attempt to break out and come to an agreement with his Armenian counterpart, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, a former head of the Karabakh committee, the Kremlin organized a military coup in Armenia and transferred power to its protege and former president of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh republic, Robert Kocharyan. In essence, what happened in Armenia then was what happened in Ukraine in 1994 – only Kocharyan was not Kuchma, but rather Medvedchuk.

But not Yanukovych. Continuing these parallels, Yanukovych was Kocharyan’s successor, Serzh Sargsyan, who tried to be friends with Moscow, but at the same time receive money from the West. Putin almost simultaneously achieved both Sargsyan and Yanukovych’s rejection of the Association Agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych lost power over the next few months. The rejection of the European association did not make such an impression on Armenian society.

However, deprived of the opportunity to maneuver, Sargsyan increasingly turned into a petty provincial dictator – and lost power four years after Yanukovych as a result of a real revolution. We can say that in Armenia the “Zelensky effect” then worked a year before Zelensky – because of all the post-Soviet leaders, Zelensky is most similar in type and style to the former journalist Nikol Pashinyan.

True, Putin remained Putin in this situation without change. The Russian dictator began to take revenge on the Armenians in the same way as he had taken revenge on the Ukrainians before, and took an ostensibly neutral position in the second Karabakh war, which doomed Armenia, plundered by two pro-Russian regimes, to defeat. But, as in the case of Ukraine, Putin’s revenge backfired – it opened the Armenians’ eyes to Russia in the same way it opened them to the Ukrainians.

Even those Armenians who believe that ties with Moscow should be maintained defend this idea not out of love, but out of hopelessness and fear of their neighbors. And Pashinyan, who has not yet completely fallen out with Putin, but is already looking for other friends and creating conditions for peace (albeit a lukewarm one) with recent enemies, seems to many simply a model of common sense.

That is why the Kremlin is fighting a losing battle in Armenia today. The main element of its blackmail was not Jermuk water or Armenian cognac, but control over Karabakh, which has finally been restored by Azerbaijan. Yes, because of the tragedy of thousands of people who were forced to leave their native places – but the Russians have been doing everything possible for decades to bring the matter to this very disaster.

If Moscow loses control over Armenia (and it will), it will also lose control over the Caucasus. The Bolsheviks returned to this region a hundred years ago for a reason: they wanted not only to keep Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians in their hands, but also to be able to blackmail Turkey and Iran, which was later even partially occupied by the Soviet Union.

It was no coincidence that Moscow began to destabilize the Caucasus in the 1990s, to incite the peoples. It needed Russia, the main destabilizer of this region, to seem the main “stabilizer” here. Not to mention the undisguised contempt with which the self-appointed colonialists treated the ancient great civilizations – for me it is a secret how the Armenians or Georgians could endure all this for centuries: it is either a hopeless situation or some kind of hypnosis.

But now the trap is almost broken. Russia will definitely leave the South Caucasus – this time for good. And I really hope that in the future we will be thanked for this.

Because if it weren’t for Ukrainian resistance, it is still unknown how many years Russia would have held the Caucasus by the throat.

As a reminder, parliamentary elections began in Armenia on June 7 , the results of which may determine the country’s further political course and the level of trust in the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

Meanwhile, Russia has intensified covert operations aimed at disrupting Armenia’s political course toward rapprochement with the West and influencing the country’s upcoming elections, including disinformation campaigns, vote-swing schemes, and support for pro-Russian candidates.

In return, the European Union intends to provide Armenia with an economic support package worth 50 million euros amid restrictions from Russia and Yerevan’s deepening cooperation with European partners.

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