Ilan Berman
Big changes are afoot in the South Caucasus. Back in August, in a move that passed largely unnoticed in the American press, the Trump administration pulled off a major diplomatic coup when it brought together Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to ink a joint declaration formally ending decades of hostility between the two regional rivals. The resulting statement included commitments by both sides to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as to renounce the use of force to acquire land, something that had bedeviled their relations for decades.
The August meeting also included a major trade component, with the U.S. securing rights to develop the Zangezur Corridor, now renamed the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). As envisioned, TRIPP will run through southern Armenia, linking Azerbaijan with its territorial exclave of Nakhchivan and bringing economic prosperity to both countries—as well as to the American companies and stakeholders that become involved there.
But now, one of the parties, Armenia, is facing an informational assault from three separate directions, as political stakeholders attempt to undermine the nascent peace effort and force Yerevan to reject the economic dividends and pro-Western politics that accompany it.
The first emanates from Russia. While the Kremlin formally welcomed the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal, the weeks since have seen a veritable deluge of negative media coverage that tells a very different story. Outlets like Komsomolskaya Pravda have accused Pashinyan of “selling out his Motherland” and betraying Armenian national interests. And Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today and arguably Moscow’s most notorious propagandist, has called the Armenian premier “a degenerate,” “a traitor” and a “CIA puppet without honor or conscience.”
The harshness of the rhetoric reflects just how much Moscow stands to lose if the deal holds and TRIPP become a reality. Russia, after all, has long wielded controlling interest over Armenian politics, complete with a long-term military presence on Armenian soil. The new Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal “shall not deploy along their mutual border forces of any third party”—an edict that Kremlin officials clearly fear might be used to evict Russian troops from the country. Worrisome, too, are the economic implications of TRIPP, which effectively displaces Moscow as a guarantor of commerce in the area. Finally, Moscow naturally fears being excluded from any new security architecture for the region, and a diminution of its own (traditionally extensive) influence.
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