This is the script for my video posted on May 29, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Armenia became an independent state. But a year later, Russia led the signing of an intergovernmental military treaty called the Collective Security Treaty, whose signatories today comprise Russia, Armenia, and four other post-Soviet states, with Russia as the primary guarantor of security. For almost thirty years, Russia and Armenia were incredibly close, but since 2020 things have shifted dramatically, with its own prime minister calling the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, a threat to the country’s national security. So what happened to change Armenia’s relationship with Russia?
Beyond the 1992 Collective Security Treaty and the creation of the CSTO in 2002, Armenia maintained a lot of other connective tissue with Russia. Under a separate 1992 agreement, Russia’s FSB Border Service patrolled Armenia’s borders with Turkiye and Iran and even ran passport control at Yerevan’s international airport. In 1997 the two countries signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance that formally committed both sides to supporting the other militarily. Armenia’s gas imports and distribution were monopolized by the Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom, the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom ran Armenia’s nuclear plant, and even the country’s electrical network was owned by Russian firms.
All of this persisted even after Russia’s wars in nearby Chechnya and Georgia and its operations in Ukraine from 2014 onward. But in 2020, Azerbaijan, backed by Turkish military advisors and equipment, retook the seven districts surrounding the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as significant parts of the territory itself, totaling 72% of the territory Armenia had controlled. Armenian forces were overwhelmed in part because their largely Soviet-era air defenses were no match for Azerbaijan’s fleet of modern drones, on top of Azerbaijan’s broader edge in artillery, intelligence, and resources. And Russia decided not to intervene, arguing that the CSTO’s Article 4 obligations for mutual defense applied only to Armenian territory recognized under international law, and technically Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as Azerbaijani.
This preserved Russian neutrality between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but at a serious cost. In November 2020 a trilateral ceasefire ended the war, ceded the surrounding districts to Azerbaijan, and resulted in about 2000 Russian peacekeepers being deployed around the line of contact and the Lachin corridor, which was the only route between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Things seemed to have calmed down, but the Russian troops were incredibly passive, and in 2022 Azerbaijani forces attacked territory that was indisputably Armenian, shelling villages with the perceived aim to coerce Armenia into conceding to favorable terms in ongoing peace negotiations and opening a land corridor between mainland Azerbaijan and its Nakhchivan exclave.
Armenia formally invoked the CSTO under Article 4 for the first time in its history, and the CSTO, which is to say Russia, did not act. They sent a fact-finding mission, and though the CSTO’s then-Secretary General said a draft assistance package for Armenia had been drawn up, it never actually delivered aid. In response, the US government and the EU engaged with Armenia to express their support, Armenia refused to host the CSTO’s key annual exercise in 2023, and things began to change.
In 2023, Azerbaijan launched a 24-hour military operation that ended the de facto state of Artsakh in Nagorno-Karabakh. Those Russian peacekeepers I mentioned did not intervene even as five of them were killed by Azerbaijani fire. Over 100000 ethnic Armenians, or roughly the entire remaining population, fled to Armenia, and the Armenian government placed the blame on Russia’s lack of intervention, saying that relying on them had been a strategic mistake.
September 2023 saw the very first bilateral exercise between the US and Armenia, which wrapped up just as Azerbaijan’s offensive began. That October, Armenia ratified the Rome Statute, accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin means that Armenia is now obliged to arrest him on site if he were to visit the country. In rapid succession, Armenia signed defense contracts with France, ended Russia’s border guard service, stopped paying its budget contributions to the CSTO, signed a Strategic Partnership Charter with the US, adopted an EU accession act, and finalized its own peace agreement with Azerbaijan, though the treaty won’t be binding until both sides ratify. Notably, those negotiations saw the current US administration broker a transport corridor to connect Azerbaijan by rail and road to the Nakhchivan exclave by passing through Armenian territory.
Today, even after becoming a Comprehensive Strategic Partner of the US, Armenia has still not formally withdrawn from the CSTO. A Russian military base is still in operation there because its lease ends in 2044. But these are residual ties. The fact of the matter is that Armenia is now closely allied with the West, having voted for the US-modified Ukraine resolution at the UN in February 2025. In 2024, bilateral trade between Russia and Armenia hit about 12.4b USD, largely driven by a re-export boom in Russian gold and diamonds passing through Armenia to skirt Western sanctions. But when this scheme ended due to heightened sanctions pressure, trade collapsed, with imports of Russian goods to Armenia dropping by more than 60%, though exports hardly declined.
Russia has framed all of this as the West trying to pull Armenia away or push Armenia onto a path similar to Ukraine. They’ve publicly disregarded Armenia’s frozen status in the CSTO, brushing it off because it has no legal basis, when in fact the legal basis is irrelevant if Armenia has functionally cut itself off from Russia. Russia has banned many Armenian imports in response and they’ve amplified their intelligence and influence operations in the country. But Armenia has responded harshly, for example by arresting the Russian-Armenian billionaire owner of the national electrical grid on charges of calling for constitutional overthrow, then nationalizing his company.
Historically, Russia hasn’t been shy about issues like this in the Caucasus. They waged two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and invaded Georgia in 2008. But the war in Ukraine has overburdened Russia and expended its resources to the point that it cannot realistically threaten Armenia directly. Pro-US and pro-EU sentiment in the country is rising, but for Armenia to pave a path forward without Russia, it will need to continue to take decisive action of its own.
Keep reading
- Why couldn’t Ukraine keep its nuclear weapons?
- How has Russia’s relationship with Cuba changed since the Cold War?
- Why is Belarus dominated by Russia?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.