Russian strongman Vladimir Putin held a phone conversation with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Monday to discuss both their relationships with the United States – an attempt by Putin to reestablish Moscow’s importance to Armenia after abandoning it amid a genocide.
Pashinyan visited Washington on Friday to meet with the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, and sign a peace deal brokered by President Donald Trump. Armenia and Azerbaijan have engaged in decades of conflict following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to which they both belonged, largely driven by incorrectly drawn borders that fueled territorial disputes. The deadliest of these disputes has been Azerbaijan’s claim over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that had for centuries been populated by Christian ethnic Armenians and that Baku ethnically cleansed in 2023.
The Nagorno-Karabakh genocide occurred in the aftermath of Russia brokering a peace agreement in 2020 and then doing nothing to enforce it when Azerbaijan invaded. This failure led Pashinyan to announce that Armenia’s relationship with Moscow had been irreparably damaged and to seek closer ties to the United States.
Russian news reports on Putin and Pashniyan’s conversation after the Armenian leader shook hands on a deal in the White House was cordial and included both Pashinyan discussing his experience with Trump and Putin updating him on his scheduled meeting with Trump in Alaska this week.
The Russian news outlet Tass claimed that the Armenian side requested the conversation.
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“Pashinyan briefed [Putin] on the outcome of his meeting with President Donald Trump of the United States and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, which had taken place in Washington on August 8,” a Kremlin statement read.
Putin, in turn, “confirmed its readiness to facilitate the comprehensive normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations” and reportedly discussed his own conversation with Trump’s Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who visited Moscow last week to build a foundation for the scheduling of an in-person meeting between Trump and Putin. The Kremlin described Putin telling Pashinyan that his conversation with Witkoff yielded “significant outcomes,” echoing American statements that identified the talks as “productive.”
According to the Armenian government, Pashinyan called Putin to discuss “the results of the negotiations” with Azerbaijan, which would also include the conclusion of a Russia-led attempt to host peace discussions through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) known as the “Minsk Group.” The Minsk Group, which the U.S. also forms part of, was established in 1992 specifically to address the dispute resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union in Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite the indigenous Armenian population of the region, communist leaders placed Nagorno-Karabakh within the borders of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, the basis of Azerbaijan’s claim over the land.
The Armenian prime minister reportedly told Putin that the Trump peace deal would involve, in part, efforts to “dissolve the mechanisms of the OSCE Minsk Group, unblocking regional communications within the framework of the principles of territorial integrity, sovereignty and jurisdiction of countries and on the basis of reciprocity, as well as the ‘Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity’ project.”
The statements did not include any indication that Putin had congratulated Pashinyan on the peace deal or in any way expressed approval of the end of the conflict.
President Trump, alongside the two regional leaders, announced American support for a road project that the two nations had agreed would be called the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” – a name Trump insisted he did not request. The road would connect Azerbaijan to the region of Nakhichevan, which both sides recognize as part of Azerbaijan but is divided from the rest of the country by Armenian territory.
“The countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan are committing to stop all fighting forever, open up commerce, travel, and diplomatic relations, and respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Trump announced on Friday. He emphasized that American investors were hoping to spend money in both countries and would be helping finance peace and reconstruction so long as both leaders committed to avoid war.
“They’re very anxious to go into these two countries,” Trump said, “and they’re going to spend a lot of money, a lot of money, which will economically benefit all three of our nations. This is incredibly positive news for the future of the entire region, and it’s a very important region, as you know.”
Aliyev further committed, following his visit to Washington, to invest $2 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, a clear message of distance from Moscow. The money would specifically go to helping Ukraine generate electric energy after years of Russian bombings of critical infrastructure sites.
An increase in American economic and political leverage in the region is a significant geopolitical blow for Putin, especially given that both countries were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Washington has historically not enjoyed any meaningful influence in this part of the Caucasus, typically relying on closer relations with neighboring Georgia. Georgia’s government has recently fallen into the control of pro-Russian parties, alienating American interests and imprisoning Georgian politicians with historically friendly ties to the West.
The opportunity for growth in American influence in Armenia was largely created by Putin failing to fulfill security commitments to Russia’s longtime ally. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict threatened to erupt into war in 2020 as Azerbaijan seized communities in the region but was paused by a Russian-brokered deal in November of that year. Russia deployed 2,000 “peacekeepers” to the region intended to prevent further hostilities. In late 2022, Azerbaijan invaded once again and critically imposed a food and medicine blockade on the Lachin Corridor, the only land route connecting the region to Armenia. This began starving out the indigenous Armenian population, a move that many human rights experts stated at the time were tantamount to genocide. The Russian peacekeepers took no action to prevent the attack.
Within a year, most of the Armenian Christian population of Nagorno-Karabakh had disappeared, forcibly displaced by starvation and bombing. Yerevan estimated that Nagorno-Karabakh had lost over 100,000 of its 120,000 people by October 2023, or over 80 percent, with no action by the Russians.
“It’s difficult to say who is to blame. There is no direct reason for such actions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov shrugged at the time. Putin personally visited Aliyev in Baku the next year, seeking deeper economic ties.
An outraged Pashinyan effectively declared the end of Armenia’s loyalty to Russia shortly thereafter, announcing the country’s intent to leave the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-led alternative to NATO. The CSTO refused to act to protect the natives of Nagorno-Karabakh on the grounds that the region was technically part of Azerbaijan, so Armenia itself was not under attack.
“When the aggression occurred, we said that the red line had been crossed. They responded by saying, ‘Well, the border isn’t officially delimited,’” Pashinyan said in December 2024, adding that the Russia-Armenia relationship had reached a “point of no return.”
Armenia signed a strategic agreement with the United States in January that included “defense, border security, and economics” features but has not yet formally departed the CSTO.
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