Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party has won today’s parliamentary election, preserving his government at one of the most consequential moments in Armenia’s post-Soviet history. The campaign was shaped by much more than ordinary domestic politics. Armenia is attempting gradually to reduce a security dependence on Russia that once seemed almost permanent, deepen relations with the European Union and United States, and build a workable peace with Azerbaijan after the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and the displacement of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians in 2023. Russia, meanwhile, has strong reasons to resist losing influence over another former Soviet republic and has applied considerable political and economic pressure as Yerevan moves westwards. Pashinyan’s victory therefore raises a deeper question about small-state sovereignty: how freely can a country choose its geopolitical orientation when geography, military vulnerability and economic dependence mean that larger powers can make some choices much more expensive than others?
Armenia’s changing relationship with Russia makes sense only in the context of what Armenians expected from the old one. For decades, Moscow was Armenia’s principal security partner. Armenia joined the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), hosted Russian troops and relied heavily on Russian weapons and economic relationships. The implicit bargain was straightforward: Armenia accepted a degree of strategic dependence because Russian power provided protection in an exceptionally difficult neighbourhood. That bargain became much less credible after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and especially the 2022–23 confrontations with Azerbaijan, when Yerevan concluded that Russian security institutions had failed to provide the protection Armenia believed membership should entail. From an Armenian perspective, dependence stopped looking like insurance and began looking like a premium being paid for a guarantee whose value had become uncertain.
Pashinyan’s response has been to diversify. Armenia has increased military cooperation with countries including France and India, expanded engagement with the EU and United States and effectively frozen much of its participation in the CSTO. This is often described as Armenia “turning West”, but diversification is the more accurate concept. Armenia cannot simply relocate geographically into Europe. Russia remains nearby, Iran is an important neighbour, Turkey’s relationship with Armenia remains historically difficult and Azerbaijan retains overwhelming strategic importance. The objective is therefore not replacing complete dependence on Moscow with complete dependence on Brussels or Washington. A small state becomes more autonomous when no single external power can make abandonment intolerably costly.
This is where Armenia resembles India’s strategic-autonomy philosophy despite their radically different scale. Both seek multiple relationships partly because concentrated dependence creates political vulnerability. But Armenia’s much smaller size exposes the limits of autonomy more clearly. A great power can absorb economic retaliation or military pressure for longer. A country of roughly three million people surrounded by much larger neighbours has fewer buffers. Formal sovereignty may say Armenia possesses the same legal right as Russia to determine its alliances; material power determines how expensive exercising that right becomes. This distinction between formal equality and substantive capacity sits underneath much of international politics. International law gives states equal sovereignty precisely because material power does not.
The Azerbaijan peace process makes Pashinyan’s position even more controversial. After decades in which Armenian politics treated control over Nagorno-Karabakh as inseparable from national security and identity, Pashinyan has increasingly accepted Azerbaijan’s internationally recognised territorial integrity and pursued normalisation. Critics regard this as surrender after military defeat; supporters argue Armenia needs to stop organising its future around a territorial conflict it no longer possesses the military capability to reverse. Both positions emerge from different understandings of what political leadership owes a nation. Is leadership principally the defence of historical claims, even when the material cost becomes extreme, or the protection of citizens’ future welfare under conditions leaders did not choose?
This is a genuinely difficult question because nations are not corporations. Territory, memory and the displacement of communities cannot be reduced to a cost-benefit spreadsheet. Yet states also possess an obligation to the living citizens whose security and prosperity depend on present decisions. Political responsibility therefore exists across time: governments inherit obligations created by history while making choices affecting people who will live decades after the current dispute. Pashinyan’s wager is that Armenia’s long-term sovereignty will be strengthened more by recognised borders, economic integration and diversified partnerships than by permanent mobilisation around a territorial question Armenia cannot currently resolve through force.
The domestic difficulty is that compromise after defeat rarely feels voluntary. An agreement may be economically rational and still lack legitimacy if citizens believe the alternative was removed through coercion. This is why Azerbaijan also has responsibilities if it wants a durable settlement. Military superiority can obtain concessions; it cannot by itself make Armenians regard the resulting regional order as legitimate. Baku therefore has an interest in credible border agreements, transport arrangements and guarantees against renewed coercion. A peace imposed by the stronger side can end fighting; a peace regarded as mutually preferable has a much better chance of surviving changes in the balance of power.
Turkey could become important here. Opening the Armenian-Turkish border and normalising relations would transform Armenia’s economic geography by reducing dependence on routes through Georgia and Iran. Trade creates no guarantee of peace, but it increases the opportunity cost of renewed confrontation and gives businesses and border communities tangible assets dependent on stability. This is one way political settlements become self-reinforcing: peace initially rests on diplomatic agreements, then gradually creates economic constituencies that acquire something to lose if the agreement collapses.
Russia’s reaction should also be understood without assuming every Russian concern is fictitious. Moscow genuinely dislikes the possibility that Western security institutions could expand into regions it historically considered strategically important. But accepting that Russia possesses security interests does not mean accepting that those interests confer a veto over Armenian foreign policy. This is the same distinction at the centre of the Ukraine war. Security interests deserve consideration; spheres of influence become problematic when consideration turns into a claimed right to determine another state’s choices. Otherwise sovereignty becomes proportional to military strength, and smaller states possess independence only until larger neighbours object strongly enough.
Western governments should avoid reproducing the same logic from the opposite direction. Armenia should not be treated primarily as another square removed from Russia’s side of a geopolitical chessboard. If Western engagement simply replaces one patron-client relationship with another, Armenian strategic autonomy has not increased very much. European and American policy is more useful when it expands Armenia’s options through trade, investment, institutional reform and defence diversification while leaving Yerevan free to maintain relationships with Iran, Russia and others where Armenian interests require them.
India’s expanding defence relationship with Armenia is particularly interesting because it provides exactly this kind of alternative without demanding alliance membership. Armenia has purchased Indian weapons including artillery and rocket systems, giving New Delhi a growing role in a region where India historically had limited strategic presence. For India, this supports defence exports and relationships across Eurasia; for Armenia, it reduces dependence on Russian equipment. Markets can therefore create strategic autonomy when additional suppliers reduce the political leverage attached to any one supply chain.
Pashinyan’s victory does not settle Armenia’s direction permanently. Elections provide governments with temporary authority, not ownership over national identity, and many Armenians remain deeply divided over relations with Azerbaijan, Russia and the West. The more important democratic achievement would be making these disagreements governable without turning every foreign-policy argument into a question of national betrayal. A sovereign society should be capable of debating whether its government is too pro-Russian, too pro-Western or too conciliatory towards Azerbaijan without opponents becoming enemies of the state.
Armenia’s situation therefore offers a particularly clear definition of sovereignty for smaller countries. Sovereignty cannot mean complete independence from external constraints; geography makes that impossible. It means possessing enough institutional strength, economic alternatives and diplomatic relationships that external constraints do not determine every important national decision in advance.
Pashinyan has effectively asked Armenians to accept a painful proposition: sometimes preserving national autonomy requires abandoning the illusion that every historical loss can be reversed. Whether his strategy ultimately succeeds will depend on whether peace with Azerbaijan becomes genuinely reciprocal, whether Western engagement produces tangible economic and security benefits and whether reducing Russian dependence creates more options rather than merely a new dependency.
Today’s election has given him more time to attempt that transformation. The larger test is whether Armenia can prove something small states throughout history have struggled to establish: that geography can constrain sovereignty without being allowed to own it.
