2. A Delicate Balancing Act
When Armenia and Russia were building the foundations of their strategic partnership in the early 1990s, a certain geopolitical environment prevailed in which relations with Moscow were conceived of as just one strand of the newly independent country’s multi-vector foreign policy. A pragmatic line of thinking, coupled with historical and economic ties, dictated that friendly relations should be established with Russia, notwithstanding the nationalist and anti-Soviet (at times anti-Russian) sentiment that gained traction during Armenia’s push for independence between 1988 and 1991. The first presidents of Armenia and Russia – respectively, Levon Ter-Petrosyan and Boris Yeltsin – shared not only a good personal relationship but also the same vision of development. This was an important point of convergence: Armenia’s strategic partner was an administration that aspired to take Russia towards democratization and Euro-Atlantic integration.4 This also revived the earlier Armenian vision of Russia as a sort of continuation of the West, a geopolitical perspective that – for obvious reasons – had been lost during the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence.
A similar line of thinking dictated that Armenia’s relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan should be normalized without historical burden. But the ongoing war in Nagorny Karabakh and regional geopolitical alignments stemming from it had their own logic.5 Armenia’s pursuit of unconditional normalization of relations with Turkey was not reciprocated. In 1992, Turkey accumulated forces along the border with Armenia and briefly considered an intervention into the country in response to the military advance of ethnic Armenian forces in Nagorny Karabakh.6 (This idea was reportedly thwarted by diplomatic pressure from Russia and the US.)7 In 1993, Turkey closed the border in solidarity with Azerbaijan.8 This was followed by an economic blockade aimed at pressuring Armenia into making concessions on Nagorny Karabakh.
All Armenian administrations under the old presidential system (led, successively, by Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan) have adhered to the principle of normalizing relations without precondition – just as, following Armenia’s political revolution in April–May 2018, the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan does. Yerevan has not made recognition of the Armenian genocide, which Turkey refuses to acknowledge, a prerequisite for the normalization of relations. At the same time, it has expected Turkey not to link normalization to the Nagorny Karabakh conflict.9 However, Turkey has failed to reciprocate, mainly because doing so would go against the interests of its ally, Azerbaijan. All high-level diplomatic rapprochements have ended with Turkey insisting on preconditions – whether involving a solution on Nagorny Karabakh that would satisfy Azerbaijan, or demanding that Armenians give up their campaign for genocide recognition worldwide.
Hard security concerns have continued to shape Armenian foreign policy throughout the post-independence era. The closure of the Turkish–Armenian border in 1993 and Turkey’s alignment with Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh made the regional security environment for Armenia more challenging. This was crucial in spurring the country to seek security cooperation with Russia. The dominant rationale was that, while it could counterbalance Azerbaijan on its own, Armenia needed a ‘protector’ against a stronger actor like Turkey, in case of a possible offensive by Turkish forces. The historical narrative in which Russia was seen as a protector of Christian Armenians in the hostile Persian and Ottoman neighbourhoods regained momentum. Joint Armenian and Russian control was installed along the Armenian border with Turkey. A 1995 agreement ratified the deployment of Russia’s military base in Gyumri, just across the border from Turkey, for 25 years. In this context, Armenia’s alignment with Russia can be seen as an effort to curtail Turkish capacity in the region, in light of Armenian concerns about the security threats from Turkey. In the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia also saw in Turkey a threat to its security agenda, reflecting the aspirations of Turkey – on the southeastern flank of NATO – to project power in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The interests of Armenia and Russia thus seemed naturally aligned.
The question as to how far concerns about Turkey were instrumental in entrenching Armenia’s reliance on Russia is an interesting one, not least because this remains the crucial rationale for policymakers in Yerevan, notwithstanding the ongoing crisis of confidence towards Russia. Armenia tends to exaggerate the threat emanating from Turkey while overestimating Russia’s significance for itself. At the same time, it underestimates its own importance to Russia.10 That said, Armenia’s threat perception is not solely rooted in historical memory, as many think, but is also driven by present realities. Turkey’s policies have not helped assuage concerns. Its continuous failure to settle relations with Armenia, its outright support for Azerbaijan and its handling of the Kurdish issue – all are factors that make Turkey an unpredictable neighbour and render it an actual threat in the eyes of Armenia’s establishment.11 Commenting on the Armenian perception of concerted hostile efforts from Turkey and Azerbaijan, a British diplomat has cited the famous Joseph Heller quote from the novel Catch-22: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’12
But Armenia’s growing economic13 and security reliance on Russia has encouraged the latter to become a more cynical partner, intent on pursuing its own agenda at the expense of key Armenian interests. This has been primarily demonstrated by Russia’s growing military cooperation with Azerbaijan, and by its obstruction of Armenia’s attempts to diversify economic and political relations with other countries. This reduction in the symmetry of the bilateral relationship has been precipitated by three major trends: shifts in Russia’s foreign policy; Armenia’s democratic decline; and limited Western engagement in Armenia.
Shifts in Russia’s foreign policy
Inside Russia, the brief soul-searching between Atlanticism and Eurasianism in the early years after the fall of the Iron Curtain ended with the victory of the Eurasianists, provoking a shift in Russia’s domestic and foreign policies. In the post-Soviet space, this meant a more assertive policy towards the ‘near abroad’ that Russia has traditionally considered its sphere of influence. This was partly fuelled by the eastwards enlargement of Euro-Atlantic institutions, which Russia saw as an encroachment on its interests. The evolving foreign policy context at that time also implied more competition with other external actors trying to fill the power vacuum in the region following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If Russian foreign policy in the 1990s was constrained by domestic political turmoil and feeble economic performance, this changed after rising prices for the country’s natural gas and crude oil started to fuel its economy and geopolitical ambition. Russia’s assertiveness grew shortly after Vladimir Putin’s rise to the Kremlin in 2000. He construed Russia as an alternative superpower shaping a multipolar world, with the ‘near abroad’ a sphere for Russian power projection.14
This resulted in growing Russian unease with Armenia’s foreign policy of complementarity, whether in relation to expanding ties with the West or pursuing closer cooperation with Iran. In parallel, Russia started to invest in promoting foreign policy convergence with Turkey and Azerbaijan. As Russia’s domestic and foreign political priorities started to shift, Armenia was unprepared for the changes in the bilateral relationship that Moscow’s more assertive foreign policy implied.
Starting with a series of equity-for-debt swaps in 2002, Russian state and state-affiliated companies gradually acquired strategically critical Armenian assets, including in telecommunications, railways, and electricity and gas distribution networks. Some of the companies bought by Russian enterprises never received the planned investment and were left to falter. In contrast, Russia scrapped (in whole or in part) the debts of some other countries, including Syria, Iraq, Cuba, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In the 2000s it reportedly obstructed plans for a higher-capacity gas pipeline between Armenia and Iran;15 as a result, Armenia lost an important potential means to improve its energy security by diversifying gas supply and possibly acting as a transit country for Iranian gas. Although Russia initially supported the Armenian–Turkish rapprochement of 2008–10, it also played along with Azerbaijan when the latter used its influence in regional energy relations to pressure Turkey into abandoning the rapprochement.
Russia’s more assertive ‘near abroad’ policy and growing antagonism with the West also implied a courting of Turkey and Azerbaijan. If in the 1990s the dividing lines between Turkey and Russia were clearer and tense, in the 2000s a different geostrategic picture emerged. In the Black Sea region and Central Asia, Turkey’s own ambitious neighbourhood policy failed to materialize. It has since found that its interests in the region are better served by collaboration with, rather than antagonism towards, Russia.16 The growing convergence between Russia and Turkey was further facilitated by a shared sense of disgruntlement with the West.17 The Russian–Turkish rapprochement gave each a degree of leverage vis-à-vis the US and the EU. Notwithstanding their clear differences in the Levant, economic and political ties between Russia and Turkey grew in the Black Sea region, with both sides speaking of a ‘strategic partnership’.
Following the Russian–Georgian war in 2008, Russia and Turkey stepped up their partnership in the region to a new level. The Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform (CSCP) proposed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then Turkey’s prime minister, included Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Russia. Turkey accommodated Russia by sticking to the letter of the Montreux Convention, essentially barring the US from using large naval ships to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia.18 Although the CSCP never materialized and was soon shelved due to regional rivalries, the fact that the initiative left out other major players – Iran, the EU and the US – essentially qualified as an attempt by Turkey and Russia to mark the region as their zone of influence, with the implied message that ‘the regional states must solve their issues on their own’.19
The Turkish–Russian rapprochement has stoked fears in Armenia that Russia’s special role in curtailing Turkey’s ambitions in the region has been compromised. This is largely driven by concerns over historical parallels, primarily the convergence in agendas that occurred between Russia and Turkey in 1920–21 when vast Armenian interests were sacrificed by the Bolsheviks to court Kemalist Turkey.20
In parallel, Russia has taken more interest in Azerbaijan because of the latter’s strategic location and energy reserves, with an eye to not allowing its unconditional alignment with the West. Following the 1994 signing by Azerbaijan of an agreement – dubbed the ‘contract of the century’ – with international companies to develop Caspian Sea oilfields, the country’s hydrocarbon resources started to flow west. The government of Azerbaijan used revenues from hydrocarbon sales to fund a massive arms build-up related to the conflict over Nagorny Karabakh. By 2010, the value of Azerbaijan’s defence budget alone exceeded Armenia’s entire state budget (though Azerbaijan, it should be noted, is a far larger economy than Armenia). Compelled to keep up in this arms race, Armenia maintained relative military parity vis-à-vis its neighbour by acquiring Russian arms at preferential prices. From the 2000s, though, in parallel to its defence alliance with Armenia, Russia had also stepped up military cooperation with Azerbaijan, quickly becoming the latter’s top arms supplier. Russia provided 55 per cent of Azerbaijan’s and 96 per cent of Armenia’s arms imports between 2007 and 2011.21 By 2015, its share of Azerbaijan’s arms imports had risen to 85 per cent.22
Russia’s official and analytical circles claim that Russia is driven by purely commercial motives in its arms deals with Azerbaijan. The popular ‘nothing personal, business only’ mantra is often used to alleviate the dissonance that arms sales to Azerbaijan create for the formal alliance between Armenia and Russia. One common argument maintains that Russian arms sales to both countries are calculated so as not to upset the military balance between them.23 Another is that, if Russia did not supply it, oil-rich Azerbaijan would simply buy arms from others.24 The suggestion is that Baku is more controllable when it buys its weapons from Russia.
From a business point of view, Russian-manufactured armaments continue to hold an advantage in that alternatives of approximately the same quality and capacity are sold at higher prices in the international arms market. And the US and EU member states have so far mainly refrained from selling offensive weaponry to Armenia and Azerbaijan, in line with an OSCE voluntary embargo. However, from the Armenian security perspective, given its mutual defence framework with Russia, the problem is that Russian arms deals have emboldened Azerbaijan not just militarily but politically. They have blurred the lines of Moscow’s alliance with Yerevan, and have boosted Baku’s confidence. In the current geopolitical setting, the act of Russia vacillating between what it now calls a ‘strategic alliance’ with Armenia and a ‘strategic partnership’ with Azerbaijan, distinctions recently introduced by Moscow, means that one is mostly possible at the expense of the other.25
As the geopolitical balance is disturbed by ambiguity over the reliability of its alliance base, the need for Armenia to rely on Russia escalates. While the ‘Turkey threat’ remains a somewhat distant bogeyman, the importance of Russia as a security guarantor is reinforced by inflation of the threat of escalation in Nagorny Karabakh. In the process, Russia also acquires levers in relation to Azerbaijan, with the latter compelled to keep buying armaments and willing to further bargain with Russia in anticipation that Russia’s support can land a favourable solution over Nagorny Karabakh.
In practice, this situation has meant an exponential rise in Armenian–Russian defence arrangements. For example, in 2010 the lease on the Russian base in Gyumri was extended until 2044. The two countries created an integrated air-defence system in 2015 and a Joint Group of Forces in 2016. However, whether or not these moves substantively increase Armenia’s security is an open question, as they also make that security overly sensitive to the agenda of one actor – Russia – prone to exploiting its partner’s reliance on it. In 2013, Russia’s military cooperation with Azerbaijan, the threat that it might revoke security guarantees, and its monopoly over energy supplies were instrumental in pressuring Armenia into abandoning its association agreement with the EU and joining the EAEU instead.26 However, Armenia has only recently started to factor the shifts in Russia’s regional approach into its own foreign policy calculus – in particular, since the four-day war in 2016. There is an understanding that a reassessment of Armenia–Russia relations is necessary to bridge the massive asymmetry.
Democratic decline in Armenia
Another factor that has contributed to the breakdown of balance in Armenia’s foreign policy was the country’s long-running democratic deficit – visible in the impaired political legitimacy of consecutive administrations in Yerevan. One could observe a correlation between the decline of democratic norms and institutions in both Armenia and Russia and the former’s growing political and economic reliance on the latter.
While Armenia started off as a promising young democracy at independence, the integrity of its political governance has been repeatedly called into doubt over the past two decades. The erosion of democratic legitimacy began with a highly contested presidential election in 1996. Since then, most presidential and parliamentary elections would generate waves of popular protests from citizens angered that the results inadequately reflected their votes. The loss of confidence in the political system has affected Armenia’s regional and international standing. Initially, its democratic credentials had been seen as conferring an advantage, compared with its neighbours, in terms of foreign policy credibility. For a time, this was an important factor in relations with Russia and the West. For a country devoid of natural or strategic resources, the loss of this ‘democratization’ advantage was significant in impairing Armenia’s ability to punch above its geopolitical weight. It also partly contributed to the dwindling of Western interest in Armenia.27
Lacking legitimacy at home, successive administrations sought support from abroad. Such support was offered by Russia, but often came at a price: the sale to Russian-controlled interests of strategic assets. This further locked Armenia into Russia’s embrace.28 The process essentially mingled Russia’s hegemonic interests with resistance by Armenia’s elite and oligarchy to a liberal economy and political system (reinforcing both the Russian interests and the Armenian resistance). Armenia’s ability to make sovereign decisions has been compromised as a result.
This partly explains why Armenia’s attempts at foreign policy diversification without first addressing its domestic deficiencies had been of limited effect. The 2018 revolution that resulted in the resignation of former-president-turned-prime minister Serzh Sargsyan, under the pressure of mass protests, and in the installation of a popular new government is likely to provide support for this argument in the long run. Snap parliamentary elections in December 2018 were widely deemed free and fair, and have for the first time in a very long while created a government that derives its legitimacy exclusively from domestic constituencies. While the leaders of this revolution do not aim to alter Armenia’s priorities, the emergence of a democratically legitimate government – and eventually, it is to be hoped, of a more liberal political system – will likely result in a more Armenia-centric foreign policy and increase the capacity of the authorities to make sovereign decisions.
The connection between Armenia’s democracy and its foreign policy is also reflected in its relations with the West. Western support for the country’s democratization has been contradictory. Although large amounts of Western financial and technical support have been directed at institutional development and reform, the EU and the US have also prioritized stability over democracy and a more evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) development path for Armenia.29 Democratic protest movements in the country have never received the vocal support from the West that similar popular protests have received in Georgia and Ukraine, although the former have often been equal in scope and depth, and even more frequent. Following the highly contested 2008 presidential election, protests were followed by a violent crackdown and 10 deaths. While Armenia has at times been penalized for being a democracy laggard,30 and controversial election results have initially drawn criticism, in each case the West has quickly reverted to business as usual, preferring to back incumbents over opposition protest leaders.
While the West has prioritized support to post-Soviet countries that have demonstrated willingness to democratize, it has not invested political capital in creating initial space for democratization in Armenia – as it has done in Georgia and Ukraine. The conventional wisdom has been that, due to Armenia’s peculiar situation, none of the massive public demonstrations would ever result in a clear pro-Western elite coming into power and a subsequent change of geopolitical orientation. The lack of Western moral support for democratic protests in Armenia – against the background of such support elsewhere in the region – has therefore created the impression among Armenians that the West would sympathize with their protests only if these carried the prospect of a pro-Western reorientation of the country. At times, Western policy may also have been guided by the imperative not to drive Armenia further into the embrace of Russia. These deficiencies in Western support for democracy in Armenia have long been an issue of concern among the country’s opposition and civil society groups, and have generated much public scepticism towards the West. Greater awareness, among opposition elites and the public, of the nature of Western geostrategic calculations, among other things, has been essential for Armenia’s recent democratic movement. By the time the 2018 ‘people power’ movement emerged, it was clear that Western support in its current form is not enough on its own to create a critical push towards true democratization in Armenia.
The limits – and failings – of Western engagement
The third factor disturbing Armenia’s foreign policy equilibrium has been the limited and waning Western engagement in the region in general, and in Armenia in particular.31 Armenia’s relationship with the West is full of dualities. While it considers itself an inherent part of European civilization, geostrategic convergence with the West has not always been readily achievable. Armenia’s resentment over its Western allies’ hypocrisy towards the ‘Armenian Question’ in the decades preceding and following the 1915 genocide is a case in point.32 This historical memory, albeit largely unspoken in today’s political discourse, has been a major reason for scepticism towards the West, its reliability on security matters, or indeed any international commitments and guarantees it could offer.33
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, another duality emerged with regard to the West, connected to Armenian support for Nagorny Karabakh’s struggle for self-determination. As Alla Mirzoyan argues, the Armenian elite …
… was a cultural elite constituted by dissidents, intellectuals, and historians striving to maintain links with the ‘sources of cultural capital in the West’. By definition, they were revisionists, greeted by the West as true democrats. However, the new elites’ revisionism did not end at the intellectual challenge to the Soviet system but questioned the internationally recognized borders and agreements. This duality remained to define Armenia’s position vis-à-vis the West and Western perception of Armenia.34
The historical disillusionment with the West partly reverberates in today’s realities as well. Essentially, it boils down to resentment of Armenia’s comparative unimportance for the West against the background of broader geostrategic calculations. In other words, the country is not important enough for its Western partners to dare angering a strategic ally such as Turkey with genocide recognitions.35 It is also not as important in the context of European efforts to diversify energy supplies; hence, the usual parity applied to Armenia and Azerbaijan in the context of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict can often tilt in oil-rich Azerbaijan’s favour against Armenia’s interests – or so is the perception from Yerevan. And, since Armenia is not as important as Georgia and Ukraine, its vulnerability in relation to Russia is not acknowledged as much as theirs. This reality has created a situation in which Armenia’s civilizational self-identification with Europe, and with the West more broadly, is not always matched by a geostrategic alignment between Armenia and the West, with the result that at times the two find themselves on the opposite side of the equation.
In the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the perception abroad of the Armenian struggle for independence – which had been one of the first such moves among Soviet republics – was that it had been a struggle for freedom by a small Christian country. The vast Armenian diaspora in the West – particularly in the US and France, which had managed to drum up official and public sympathy for the struggle – played an important role in establishing this perception. The democratic governance and domestic stability of the early independence years also ensured that Armenia was perceived in some quarters as an ‘island of democracy’ in the South Caucasus, whereas its neighbours – Georgia and Azerbaijan – were considered failed states.
As with Russia, democratic decline in Armenia and shifts in the regional architecture have altered relations with the West. More broadly, however, the South Caucasus has remained relatively insignificant in the geopolitical calculus of major Western powers. For the US and the EU, the region is secondary to relations with Russia, Turkey and Iran, and its issues have largely been a sideshow in the context of the higher-profile policy challenges presented by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One particular problem with the West’s engagement has been that it has treated the South Caucasus as a monolithic entity, when in fact the region is divided by patterns of amity and enmity. For Armenia, these regional dividing lines have got in the way of cultivating closer ties with the West.
From 1994 onwards, Azerbaijan’s ‘contract of the century’ concerning development of its oil reserves gave it a strategic advantage over Armenia in relations with the West. Flowing west through Georgia and Turkey, its hydrocarbons bypassed not only Russia and Iran but also Armenia, excluding the latter from most regional energy infrastructure initiatives supported by the West. Azerbaijan has used this ‘energy card’ and its antagonization of Iran, along with the lobbying of parliamentary bodies in the West,36 to drum up support for itself over the Nagorny Karabakh conflict. This has brought relative success in swaying Western sympathies, especially in light of commercial interests.37 It has also triggered mistrust in Armenia towards Western states and structures. Even with the support of the diaspora, Armenian public diplomacy has lagged behind the more aggressive effort by Azerbaijan.38
Western detachment from Armenia has been unintentional but persistent. From the Western perspective, support for the Azerbaijan–Georgia–Turkey axis has meant strengthening these countries’ pro-Western drive and safeguarding their independence against potential encroachment by Russia. Armenia has turned out to be the collateral damage from this process. This has entrenched enmity between Armenia and Azerbaijan/Turkey, has hardened each party’s position, and has pushed Armenia to seek further partnership with Russia.39
In the context of Armenia’s growing ties with Russia, and the widening rift between the West and Russia, another factor has come into play. The ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004), and the emergence of pro-Western elites in these countries, defined distinctive and divisive new lines between the West’s friends and others in the post-Soviet space. Against the background of a pro-Western and democracy-aspiring Georgia and an energy-rich (even if not democratic) Azerbaijan, as well as growing Russian–Armenian ties in parallel to growing Russian–Western antagonism, Armenia’s standing was diminished. The division of countries into pro-Western and pro-Russian camps was actively encouraged not only by Russia but also by the West. The anti-Russian sentiment generally prevalent in the West would often be projected on to Armenia, which was primarily viewed through the lens of its alliance with Russia.
The reaction in European circles following Armenia’s 2013 U-turn on the EU association agreement underlined how the country is often viewed in simplistic terms. Some officials suggested that its decision only confirmed Armenia’s inherent pro-Russian stance and that the EU should move on.40 This was disheartening for the country’s civil society, and for the part of public that was devastated by the decision. In an attempt at damage control, Armenia suggested it could sign the political component of the association agreement. The EU refused, on the grounds that this would create an unwanted precedent for Ukraine.41 Months later, however, following the start of the Ukraine crisis, Kyiv was offered the chance to sign the political part of its own association agreement with the EU while postponing signature of the accompanying DCFTA. While the reaction from the EU towards Armenia was perhaps understandable in light of the shock and disappointment Yerevan’s decision had caused, in Armenia it was interpreted as unfair – the perception being that Ukraine had been granted an opportunity denied to Armenia.42
At other times, Armenia has missed opportunities to steer clear of Western–Russian contention. A case in point was its 2014 vote alongside Russia against a UN General Assembly resolution that recognized the territorial integrity of Ukraine and denounced the independence vote in Crimea. Armenia’s rationale – that it was showing principled support for the notion of national self-determination – was not convincing to its Western partners, and the move was interpreted as yet another instance of it pandering to Russian interests.43 Armenia also had another reasoning: in the UN, where tit-for-tat voting often occurs, Ukraine had long voted against Armenian interests and in support of Azerbaijan on issues of national self-determination versus territorial integrity. However, in cases like this, Armenia’s interests would arguably have been better served by abstention.
The degree of understanding of Armenia’s security predicament in Western countries has been hard to gauge. Most have found it difficult to treat Turkey, a NATO member, as a security concern for Armenia. In the early years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the US saw Turkey as an extension of Western influence in the region and as a model of development. While Azerbaijan and Georgia saw Turkey as offering a route to greater engagement with the West, this turned out not to be the case for Armenia. Following the closure of the Armenian–Turkish border in 1993, the hypothetical door to NATO membership was shut.
Furthermore, Turkey has created considerable practical hindrances to Armenia’s engagement with NATO. It has fostered a negative image of the country as Russia’s ‘puppet’,44 even when Turkey’s own relations with Russia have been good. At the same time, Armenia’s concerns about Turkish military involvement in the conflict zone around Nagorny Karabakh – through training support to the Azerbaijani military and participation in the planning of hostilities on the Azerbaijani side, including as recently as during the 2016 war – are not fully grasped in the West.45 Although Armenia has had some success in raising awareness of these issues in NATO and more broadly,46 its perception of threat is still not widely acknowledged in the US and the EU, where Turkey is seen as a partner for work on the Nagorny Karabakh issue.47
It is broadly assumed in Armenia that a more decisive push from the West could help unlock the border with Turkey, thereby reducing the overall security threat Armenia faces. This would loosen Russia’s grip over the region, while creating a more constructive environment for Armenians and Azerbaijanis to solve the Nagorny Karabakh issue.48 Between 2008 and 2010, and for a while afterwards, there had been a lot of pressure on Turkey, primarily from the Barack Obama administration in the US, to open the border and normalize relations without linking this to other issues. While Yerevan and Washington went the extra mile to try to make the Armenian–Turkish border opening happen, their pressure had limited results, and a decision could not be imposed on Turkey.49 Arguably, if Armenia and the EU had signed their association agreement, including the DCFTA, the EU would have been compelled to increase pressure on Turkey (with which it has a customs union) to open the border.50 However, the expectation that Turkey’s approach towards Armenia could be positively transformed by Turkey’s further integration with the EU, and by Ankara’s partnership with the West more broadly, has not been fulfilled. Recent domestic developments, and the escalation of regional tensions in the Middle East, make Turkey an increasingly problematic partner for the US and the EU. The current rift between the EU and Turkey, as well as between the US and Turkey since the election of President Donald Trump, further diminishes Western influence in Ankara.
The West’s inability to offer security arrangements is not confined to Armenia, with the cases of Georgia and Ukraine often referred to in the context of ‘lessons learned’. While the EU and the US have welcomed and supported these two countries’ pro-Western orientation, they have been unable or unwilling to extend them security guarantees to mitigate the political and economic costs of antagonizing Russia. The West clearly underestimated how Russia would react to the pro-Western aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine, but a desire to avoid direct confrontation with Russia has made it reluctant to take the two countries under its NATO security umbrella.
The formal security guarantees offered by Russia to Armenia have not been seriously tested yet in the context of the latter’s security predicament – and Russia has given some reasons to doubt them, as discussed above. However, Armenia’s formal convergence with Russia is driven not only by its security expectations but also, increasingly, by an unwillingness to antagonize it directly. This has been the primary reason why, while pursuing cooperation with the EU and NATO almost as vigorously as have some other Eastern Partnership countries, Armenia has kept a low profile. For example, Laure Delcour and Kataryna Wolczuk refer to the period between 2010 and 2013 as that of Armenia’s ‘silent Europeanization’, when it demonstrated high receptiveness to EU reform stimuli, contrary to indications that it would not.51 In another example, Armenia’s cooperation with NATO has been limited in scope compared to that of Georgia, but qualitatively similar.52 At the same time, Armenia has not voiced any ambition to join the EU or NATO. Being in a formal alliance with Russia reduces the possibility of direct confrontation, although this does not necessarily preclude Moscow from posing indirect security threats.
Following the events in Ukraine since 2014, and the crisis in relations between the West and Russia, these nuances are more acknowledged in the West than before. However, the level of acknowledgment varies across countries, depending on their own policies vis-à-vis Russia. For example, Germany and France are more conscious of the circumstances of the former Soviet republics, seeing complementarity of the kind sought by Armenia as an optimal approach to avoiding polarization for most of these republics.53 Germany deems it useful that Armenia is trying to deepen relations with the West without triggering confrontation with Russia.54 By the same token, the absence of explicit Armenian aspirations to NATO membership is helpful insofar as this implies no NATO responsibility for Armenia’s security and allows some development of further relations with NATO without antagonizing Russia.55 However, at least at the level of official discourses, Armenia’s security vulnerabilities in relation to Russia are not acknowledged. It remains unclear how these nuances, still overlooked in high-level policymaking, could translate into more practical solutions in the relationship between the West and Armenia.
Ultimately, there has been a lingering impression in Armenia’s civil society, as well as in analytical and some political circles, that the country has been left alone to deal with its predicament. Similarly, there is a prevalent perception that the West is ready to leave Armenia in Russia’s sphere of influence. That similar sentiments are shared in Georgia and Ukraine, where Western support has been more tangible, only emphasizes the cogency of those concerns in Armenia. If anything, the West’s half-hearted engagement with Armenia has played a role in the breakdown of Yerevan’s delicate balancing act.
4 Interview with an Armenian member of parliament, June 2016, Yerevan.
5 Although the conflict is an important determinant of Armenia’s foreign policy, its history, logic and the diplomacy around it are beyond the coverage of this paper. The issue is therefore viewed here only in the context of Armenia’s relations with other actors.
6 For the dynamics of Armenian–Turkish interaction, see the timeline of events compiled by the European Stability Initiative at http://www.esiweb.org/index.php?lang=en&id=281&story_ID=27&slide_ID=1.
7 The commander in chief of the Commonwealth of Independent States threatened that Turkey’s intervention could lead to a Third World War. See Goldberg, C. (1992), ‘Moscow Sees War Threat if Outsiders Act in Karabakh’, Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-21/news/mn-337_1_karabakh-conflict. In a 2015 interview with Azatutyun (RFE/RL’s Armenian service), Armenia’s former head of national security, David Shahnazaryan, said that the US threatened to intervene even if Turkey were to convince Russia to stand by.
8 This was when Karabakh Armenian military forces started to gain control over regions falling beyond the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast.
9 A common argument from opponents of an unconditional opening of the border is that it would remove Armenia’s motivation to compromise, and would thus entrench its position on Nagorny Karabakh. However, it can be argued that in fact the closed border has so far entrenched Azerbaijan’s position: its logic is to use the blockade (along with the threat of force) to extract unilateral concessions from the Armenian side without having to commit to actual concessions of its own.
10 Interview with Richard Giragosian, Director, Regional Studies Center, June 2016, Yerevan.
11 Interview with a high-level Armenian Defence Ministry official, June 2016, Yerevan.
12 Interview with a British diplomat, May 2016, London.
13 Armenia relies on Russia for gas imports, and several critical sectors of the economy are under Russian control.
14 Aron, L. (2013), ‘The Putin Doctrine: Russia’s Quest to Rebuild the Soviet State’, Foreign Affairs, 8 March 2013, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2013-03-08/putin-doctrine.
15 Mghdesyan, A. (2015), ‘Armenia’s Power Deals with Iran, Russia’, Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 15 September 2015, https://iwpr.net/global-voices/armenias-power-deals-iran-russia.
16 Goksel, N. (2012), ‘The dynamics of the Ankara-Moscow partnership in relation to the South Caucasus’, Center for Strategic Studies, Baku, and Russian Diplomatic Academy, August 2012, http://turkishpolicy.com/dosyalar/files/DNG-%20Turkey-Russia-Caucasus%20August%202012%20.pdf.
17 Hill, F. and Taspinar, O. (2006), ‘Turkey and Russia: Axis of the excluded?’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 48:1, pp. 81–92.
18 Bechev, D. (2018), ‘Turkey and Black Sea Security: Ten Years After the War in Georgia’, Atlantic Council, 8 August 2018, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/turkey-and-black-sea-security-ten-years-after-the-war-in-georgia.
19 As spelled out by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. See Izvestia (2008), «Россия и Турция не стали ссориться из-за Грузии» [Russia and Turkey decided not to argue because of Georgia], 4 September 2008, https://iz.ru/news/340354.
20 These were reflected in new border divisions between Kemalist Turkey and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and between Kemalist Turkey and the newly Sovietized Caucasus republics drawn up in the treaties of Moscow (March 1921) and Kars (October 1921) respectively.
21 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2012), ‘Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2011’, March 2012, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/files/FS/SIPRIFS1203.pdf.
22 Kucera, J. (2015), ‘Report: Azerbaijan Gets 85 Percent Of Its Weapons From Russia’, Eurasianet, 17 March 2015, http://www.eurasianet.org/node/72581.
23 REGNUM (2014), «Россия - Армения - Азербайджан: оружейный баланс в условиях политического дисбаланса» [Russia-Armenia-Azerbaijan: the military balance amidst political imbalance], 15 July 2014, https://regnum.ru/news/1825431.html.
24 As voiced by President Vladimir Putin. See Musayelian, L. and Musayelyan, S. (2016), ‘Russia, Azerbaijan Discuss Military Cooperation’, Azatutyun.am, 15 August 2016, http://www.azatutyun.am/a/27922543.html.
25 REGNUM (2016), «Армения – союзник, Азербайджан – партнер: посол России в Армении» [Armenia is an ally, while Azerbaijan is a partner: Russia’s ambassador to Armenia], 25 April 2016, https://regnum.ru/news/2124722.html.
26 Shirinyan, A. and Ralchev, S. (2013), ‘U-turns and Ways Forward: Armenia, the EU and Russia Beyond Vilnius’, Policy brief, Institute for Regional and International Studies, November 2013, http://iris-bg.org/fls/iris-shirinyan&ralchev-Armenia-EU-Russia-Beyond-Vilnius-nov13.pdf. This also effectively discredits Russia’s claims that its arms deals are motivated purely by commercial considerations, and points to the political leverage it gets vis-à-vis Armenia and Azerbaijan.
27 On the impact that the democracy factor has had on Armenia’s relations with Russia and the West, see Mirzoyan, A. (2010), Armenia, the Regional Powers, and the West: Between History and Geopolitics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
28 See, for example, Danielyan, E. (2007), ‘Moscow Signals Support for Armenian Power Handover’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 4, Issue 74, 16 April 2007, https://jamestown.org/program/moscow-signals-support-for-armenian-power-handover/.
29 For example, Armenia’s Western partners have been positive about the country’s recent constitutional shift to a parliamentary system, even though critics had long dismissed it as an attempt by President Serzh Sargsyan to continue his rule by moving into the prime minister’s office after his second term ended in April 2018. The rationale from the EU was that the shift would still make Armenia more democratic in the longer run. See Weise, Z. (2018), ‘Armenia’s disputed move toward true democracy’, Politico, 6 April 2018, https://www.politico.eu/article/armenia-true-democracy-disputed-move-eu-agreement-turkey/.
30 For example, in 2008 the US suspended funding from the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
31 For more on this, see Mchedlishvili, G. (2016), Changing Perceptions of the West in the South Caucasus: Adoration No More, Research Paper, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/changing-perceptions-west-south-caucasus-adoration-no-more.
32 The Armenian Question broadly refers to the fate and rights of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman empire and their national liberation struggle in the context of major European countries’ policies towards the Middle East. While European countries pressured the Ottoman government to improve the rights and conditions of Christian minorities, including Armenians, they also often used the question as a bargaining chip against the empire in what was a geopolitical competition of that time. Armenian hopes placed in European countries were never fulfilled, while the Ottoman empire handled the Armenian Question through consecutive massacres culminating in what is known as the Armenian genocide of 1915.
33 Mirzoyan (2010), Armenia, the Regional Powers, and the West, p. 162.
34 Ibid., p. 136.
35 Toosi, N. (2018), ‘Top Obama aides ‘sorry’ they did not recognize Armenian genocide’, Politico, 19 January 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/19/armenian-genocide-ben-rhodes-samantha-power-obama-349973.
36 European Stability Initiative (2012), ‘Caviar Diplomacy: How Azerbaijan Silences the Council of Europe’, 24 May 2012, Berlin, https://www.esiweb.org/index.php?lang=en&id=156&document_ID=131.
37 Most of the author’s interlocutors among Western diplomats confirmed the importance of the oil sector for the policies of some Western governments towards the region.
38 Interview with a German expert, December 2017, Berlin.
39 The realization of this fact further informed the EU and US refusal to fund or promote the construction of the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway, prompting them to call instead for the reopening of the existing Kars–Gyumri–Tbilisi railway.
40 For example, following the U-turn, Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, said that Armenia’s association agreement was ‘now off the table’; his Polish counterpart, Radek Sikorski, said Poland rejected any alternative deal. See News.am (2013), ‘Association Agreement with Armenia off the table - Carl Bildt’, 10 September 2013, http://news.am/eng/news/170554.html; and Danielyan, E. (2013), ‘Poland Also Rejects Alternative EU-Armenia Accord’, Azatutyun.am, 18 September 2013, http://www.azatutyun.am/content/article/25109400.html.
41 Interview with an Armenian Foreign Ministry official, June 2016, Yerevan.
42 Ibid.
43 Interview with a British diplomat, May 2016, London.
44 Interview with a high-level Armenian Defence Ministry official, June 2016, Yerevan.
45 Interview with a British diplomat, May 2016, London.
46 Interview with a high-level Armenian Defence Ministry official, June 2016, Yerevan.
47 Interview with a Western diplomat, June 2016, Yerevan.
48 Interview with Tatul Hakobyan, Director, ANI Armenian Research Center, June 2016, Yerevan.
49 Interview with a Western diplomat, June 2016, Yerevan.
50 Interview with a European diplomat, June 2016, Yerevan.
51 Delcour, L. and Wolczuk, K. (2015), ‘The EU’s Unexpected ‘Ideal Neighbour’? The Perplexing Case of Armenia’s Europeanisation’, Journal of European Integration, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 491–507, doi: 10.1080/07036337.2015.1004631.
52 Interview with a high-level Armenian Defence Ministry official, June 2016, Yerevan.
53 Interview with a former European diplomat, May 2016, London.
54 Interview with a German expert, December 2017, Berlin.
55 Interview with a Western diplomat, June 2016, Yerevan.