Photo of the Mother Armenia statue in Victory Park, Yerevan, Armenia, on October 19, 2025. Armenia’s pro-Western pivot is unlikely to be reversed by the upcoming elections. (Shutterstock/EvaL Miko)

What Washington Should Do About Armenia After Its Elections

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Even a strong anti-Pashinyan vote in Armenia’s parliamentary elections would be unlikely to reverse the prime minister’s foreign policy.

Today, June 7, Armenians are voting in a parliamentary election that has been described, accurately enough, as a referendum on the country’s geopolitical direction. Six weeks of Western commentary have framed it as a binary: if Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wins, the country’s Western pivot survives; if he loses, Russian influence returns to Yerevan. 

The framing is too tidy and has led to a policy prescription that Washington must act loudly before the vote to save the Trump administration’s signature win in the South Caucasus. This is wrong on both political and substantive grounds. The pivot has already happened. The election will decide how durable it is, not whether it happened. What Washington does after the election will be much more important than anything it did before.

The realignment is real and not Pashinyan’s personal project. Since Russia stood aside during the 2020 war that cost Armenia control of Nagorno-Karabakh, Yerevan has dismantled its dependence on Russia with remarkable speed. The Russian share of Armenian arms imports has collapsed from roughly 94 percent a decade ago to under 10 percent today; India and France are now the main suppliers. Russian border guards have left every Armenian frontier post. 

Armenia froze its participation in the........

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