Armenia turns towards west in search of allies amid Azerbaijan tensions

With its waterfall, hot spring, orchards full of apricot blossom and a gorge through which the swollen Arpa River races, the town of Jermuk since Soviet times has been one of the most visited in Armenia. That was until just after midnight on 12 September 2022 when Azerbaijani forces surged over the border, advancing about 4 miles in a two-day push that left them in full control of the long mountain ridge overlooking the town.

“It was truly frightening. The forest was set on fire. It was like lightning coming down on us. It went on for two days. We did not know how it would end, and how to get our families out,” recalled Rubik Avakelyan, 69, sitting on a park bench.

The initial three-hour attack included mortars, heavy artillery and drones. The whole town now lives in fear of a further attack. “We did not know which way to turn, but I do not see much future here,” Avakelyan said.

Closer to the frontline, buildings and a fish farm lie abandoned, adding to the sense of foreboding and decay that contested borders can bring.

“The Azeris are fortifying their positions and we think when the snow is over they are planning something else,” said Vahagn Arsenyan, the mayor of the 9,000-strong town. “We expect a new aggression at any time, and right now and here where we are sitting in this office is a visible target for them. They have damaged us economically and psychologically. The hotel rooms were usually 90% occupied.”

Tourism income is down 60% as visitors are put off by the presence of Azerbaijan’s forces only 3 miles away. “If there is no economy, families want to leave,” Arsenyan said.

The quest for suitable allies is a constant in Armenia’s history, as testified to by a statue of a 17th-century Armenian diplomat, Israel Ori, on the outskirts of town. Ori dedicated his life to the country’s liberation from the Persian and Ottoman empires. He travelled through Europe fruitlessly in search of countries willing to help liberate Armenia, before finally arriving at the court of Peter the Great to plead: “We do not have another hope, we hope for God and your country.”

Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, is caught in a similar predicament. He has invested hope in building alliances to fend off the “Turks”, as many Armenians call the Azeris. However, it is not to a distracted Russia that he has turned but to the west, a gamble for this lonely democracy in a region of authoritarianism.

It is a remarkable turnaround for a country that used to get 98% of its arms from Russia and was seen as probably the most pro-Moscow of the former Soviet republics at the time of the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.

Pashinyan came to power in a velvet revolution in 2018. Faced with intractable conflicts, he did not initially seek to break the security partnership with Russia. Landlocked, with two of its four borders – with Turkey and Azerbaijan – closed, Pashinyan could hardly afford to alienate Russia in what Moscow regarded as its back yard.

But a rethink has been prompted by a series of traumatic defeats at the hands of the better trained and better armed Azerbaijan in 2020 and 2022, followed by the expulsion of more than 100,000 Armenians from the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. On the latter two occasions, Russia, burdened by the war in Ukraine, failed to come to Armenia’s protection, in effect trashing security guarantees.

Popular anger at the perceived betrayal by Russian peacekeepers, especially among some of the expelled refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh, is intense.

Sitting in a rudimentary government-provided flat in the capital, Yerevan, Ruslan Hayrapetyan, a former police officers, said he repeatedly went to the Russian peacekeepers with carefully documented incidents of Azeri attacks on farmers, only to be told by the Russians: “Do you think we are here to die for you?”

His wife, Nina, said that as Azerbaijan pushed into the enclave after an eight-month food blockade, her family spent two days hiding from the shelling in shelters and were then told that the best that Russians could do was open a road out of their town, Martuni, to the capital, and from there they would be taken on buses through the Lachin corridor to Armenia.

She said the town administrator told them: “In 10 hours the Azeris will enter the town. You may stay, but I will remind you of the massacres of 1915. You will be tortured, raped and beheaded.”

Ethnic Armenians fled what had been their homeland for generations, in what they regarded as a piece of ethnic cleansing, and some of their captured political leaders still languish in jails in Azerbaijan. Pashinyan, in an interview with a group of British journalists, admitted he believed the refugees now scattered around Armenia would never be able to return.

The episode caused the rupture in Armenian-Russian relations and further polarised an already divided Armenian society. Russia’s peacekeepers have this month left Nagorno-Karabakh ahead of schedule. In a sign of an ideological chasm, the speaker of the Armenian parliament this week attacked Russia’s Ukraine policy, leading to claims of Russophobia from Moscow.

National assembly members complain that Azerbaijan seems unconstrained and determined to raise more demands. “My profession, international law, is dead,” said Vladimir Vardanyan, the chair of the legal affairs committee. He warned of a new era of imperialism in which countries such as his own were squeezed.

“Each and every empire has been interested in increasing its land, and since we currently have a situation where the traditional alliances built at Potsdam [and] Yalta are no longer operating, sovereignty becomes ever more vulnerable,” he said. “It’s important we build a consensus about the future of this region because if we do not, we will have a more imperialistic world than in the 19th century.”

In his tiny office in Yerevan, Tigran Grigoryan, an articulate thinktanker, blamed the “fiasco” in Nagorno-Karabakh on the fact that the war in Ukraine had distracted and weakened Russia. He said: “Relations with Azerbaijan turned out to be more important for Russia than fulfilling its obligations to Armenia. President Ilham Aliyev [of Azerbaijan] has seen this power vacuum and the military imbalance between the two countries to make threats and extract ever more unilateral concessions.”

This month Pashinyan ceded four unoccupied border villages in the north-eastern province of Tavush back to Azerbaijani control after three decades. It was billed as the first step in the negotiated process of defining the borders between the two countries along the boundaries that existed at the time of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Accused by the opposition of endless capitulation, Pashinyan insisted the alternative would have been war. The deal sparked days of protests by villagers, leading to as many as 80 arrests in the capital.

Emotions had already been running high since it was the anniversary of the Armenian genocide, a time when tens of thousands of Armenians, carrying carnations and roses, process to the monument that commemorates a genocide that not all countries, including the UK, recognise.

“Virtually everyone in Armenia has one ancestor or relative who was either killed in the genocide or forced to leave its ancestral home,” Rubinyan said.

The most visible example of the pivot has been since February 2023 the deployment of a 200-strong unarmed EU civilian monitoring mission that has already amassed more than 2,000 patrols from six bases on the Armenian side of the border. With their blue flags, Jeeps and binoculars, they observe Azerbaijani troop movements and send copious daily reports back to Brussels. The staff seem convinced they provide reassurance when tensions and disinformation flourish.

Markus Ritter, the mission’s director, defended its limited objectives. “We can calm things down. We have become a stabilising factor,” he said. “If you compare the situation before the deployment and afterwards, there is a difference.”

But in parts of southern Armenia, Russia blocks his observers from operating. Ritter admitted: “This is a country that is desperately looking for friends and allies.”

Armenia is now buying weapons from India and France, and on 5 April the EU and the US pledged to provide Armenia with €270m and $65m respectively.

The new partnership is designed to start easing Armenia’s heavy dependence on the Russian markets and energy. But it is a very modest package, prompting one Armenian diplomat to complain privately: “I fear we are being led like lambs to the slaughter.”