Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s Prime Minister, has decided to align Armenia with the United States, maybe also with NATO. Accordingly, he has arranged anti-Russian protests in Yerevan, and carried out military exercises with the United States. It is unlikely the Russians will allow him to make deals with Washington.
Armenia, a country with around three million people, is wedged between Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Iran and Georgia. While Armenia’s historical enemy is Türkiye, in recent years Armenia has been involved in supporting ethnic and religious Christian Armenians living in Nagorno Karabakh.
Armenia has considerable support in the United States, especially due to the Armenian genocide carried out by Türkiye (1894-1896, 1915-1918) that took the lives of 1.5 million Armenians. Almost 400,000 Americans of Armenian descent live in the United States.
Nagorno Karabakh is a landlocked region in the South Caucasus. During Soviet rule it was territorially part of Azerbaijan but Armenia more and more disputed that status. (Both were Soviet states.)
Most of the territory came to be governed by the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh (also known as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic [NKR]) as a result of the first Nagorno-Karabakh War, which ended in 1994. Armenians have been accused of seeking to purge the region of ethnic Azeris, destroying homes, farms, mosques and even cemeteries, and driving tens of thousands of local Moslems out of the country.
In 2020 war again broke out, leading to a significant Azeri victory, and a defeat for the Armenian government headed by Pashinyan. He blamed the defeat on lack of support from Russia, although he agreed to a settlement brokered by Vladimir Putin that placed Russian peacekeepers around the Lachin corridor protecting the Nagorno Karabakh capital, Stepanakert.
- When Russian drones show up in North Korea - October 8, 2026
- RAF Fairford big-scale attack try represents serious threat to US - September 29, 2026
- The Ukraine negotiations and Ukraine’s future - September 16, 2026