RT shared the response of six top Russian experts to Armenia’s latest elections, which explicitly Western-backed incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won despite claims of fraud. They’ll be briefly reviewed and critiqued in this piece. Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs Fyodor Lukyanov noted that Pashinyan lost the supermajority required for reforming the constitution, which is Azerbaijan’s demand for a peace treaty, but ignored that the peaceful state of affairs will still likely continue.
Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics at RUDN University said that “EU membership remains more of a political slogan than a realistic scenario. Yet this rhetoric serves an important domestic purpose. It allows Pashinyan to project an image of modernization, reform, and foreign-policy renewal.” Meanwhile, head of diplomatic studies at RUDN University Alexander Bobrov thinks that Armenia’s pro-Western pivot might proceed gradually, not at an accelerated pace like many expect. He might soon be proven wrong.
Next up was Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev, who believes that the results “do not give [Pashinyan] any mandate – moral, political, or legal – to pursue sweeping reforms of either Armenia’s domestic or foreign policy course.” Many in Russia would agree with his assessment but it doesn’t mean that Pashinyan will decelerate his pro-Western pivot. As for Deputy Director of the Institute of CIS Countries Vladimir Zharikin, he thinks that “everyone lost”, both Pashinyan and Armenia.
Finally, Head of the Scientific Council at the Center for Political Conjuncture Alexei Chesnakov shared five lessons from the campaign, which included him expressing his disagreement with those who presented the vote as a “final battle for the Caucasus”. Conspicuously absent from all six top Russian experts’ responses is any mention of last August’s “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP), which serves the dual purpose of a NATO military logistics corridor into Central Asia.
It was earlier speculated here in a review of new RIAC President Dmitry Trenin’s interview with Italian media that “[TRIPP] might truly be the ultimate taboo among Russian experts right now” that not even he, who’s known for breaking Russian political taboos, dares break. The reason might be to avoid spooking Turkiye into accelerating its leading role in expanding NATO influence along Russia’s southern periphery if it interprets top experts’ critical assessments of TRIPP as a signal from the Russian State.
Be that as it may, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk already told TASS in early April that TRIPP “upset the regional balance that had existed since 1828”, and representatives of Defense and Foreign Ministries have also alluded to southern-emanating threats from NATO as pointed out here. These can only realistically materialize at scale through TRIPP, which will now be implemented during Pashinyan’s third term, thus making his re-election of immense national security significance for Russia.
“A Former Top Russian Spy Just Gave The Establishment A Long-Overdue Reality Check”, which included warning that the “new war” that Russia is fighting and which might last for a few decades could expand to new regions, and the South Caucasus and/or Central Asia could be among them due to TRIPP. The best-case scenario is thus that the experts that RT spoke to are trying to “psyche out Turkiye” by “playing dumb” about TRIPP while the worst-case one is that they don’t think it’s important enough to talk about.
