Putin–Pashinyan: A Dialogue on Charting the Path on the SCO Sidelines

On the margins of the 2026 SCO Summit in Bishkek, Armenia’s government once again demonstrated its foreign-policy indecisiveness and propensity to evade responsibility for making up its mind in favour of either the EU or the EAEU, whilst forgoing a nationwide referendum on the matter.

“Did Russian Slip Their Mind All of a Sudden?”

The most widely discussed episode was Nikol Vovaevich’s decision to deliver his address in Armenian rather than in Russian—the only leader present at the “SCO ” session to have done so. The media were prompt to label this move a “provocation,” starkly illustrating the accelerating distancing of Armenia’s foreign-policy trajectory from Russia. Some even juxtaposed the Armenian premier’s “stunt” and the political style characteristic of Ukrainian President V. Zelensky, who regularly “draws a blank on Russian” in his public speeches (as well as English, on a related note—a phenomenon quite often observed at high-level meetings with Western leaders; suffice it to recall the episode at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025). Moreover, in May 2026, at the 8th European Political Community Summit in Yerevan, N. Pashinyan and V. Zelensky “synced up in forgetting Russian,” having conducted their own bilateral negotiations in English.

Nevertheless, however significant the political symbolism may be—and its semantic weight is often acquired precisely through the interpretation of the underlying actions by other actors (for instance, Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov commented on Pashinyan’s choice of Armenian language as follows: “He might have got to know that interpretation was available into other languages, hence delivering his speech in Armenian”; “Peculiar, but nothing more than that”)—it is more important to focus on what the Russian and Armenian........

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