Armenia

The nervy win in Dublin moves the Republic of Ireland up to third in Group F, a point behind Hungary, who boosted their chances of securing a play-off place with a dramatic late draw against Portugal.

The group is delicately poised with two games remaining. If Hungary beat Armenia in their next game, the Republic of Ireland must earn at least a point to take the battle for second place into their trip to Budapest on 16 November.

The Republic of Ireland’s chances have twice been hit by late goals during this window, having conceded a 91st-minute Ruben Neves goal in Saturday’s 1-0 loss to Portugal in Lisbon.

However, Azaz hopes the Irish players can build on that performance and Tuesday’s crucial win in their quest to upset Cristiano Ronaldo and co in Dublin on 13 November.

“We know it’s going to be tough, but we’ll take confidence from last week and this game and we’ll be confident we can do something special,” Azaz added.

“It’s going to be a big occasion, we saw the last game we can compete and they’re top players, but we have to be able to compete and no doubt we’ll be right up for it.”

Armenia boss Yegishe Melikyan said Barseghyan apologised to his team-mates after the game.

“Of course, the red card changed the game. It was a mistake,” said Melikyan.

“He took responsibility. He said sorry to the whole dressing room. But, if a player makes a mistake, it is also my mistake and for that I apologise.

“If there was no red card and we played 11 v 11, I think we could have got a good result. I thought we could have won, but we must go forward and I think we can get good results in the near future.”

Follow our live build-up, including team news, ahead of our text commentary stream of the FIFA 2026 qualifying event.

Who: Armenia vs Portugal
What: UEFA qualifiers for FIFA 2026 World Cup
Where: Vazgen Sargsyan Republican Stadium in Yerevan, Armenia
When: Saturday, September 6 at 8pm (16:00 GMT).

How to follow: We’ll have all the build-up on Al Jazeera Sport from 13:00 GMT in advance of our live text commentary stream.

Portugal begin their quest to reach the FIFA 2026 World Cup when they travel to Armenia on Saturday for their UEFA qualifying match, but much of the focus is on the first match for the Portuguese since the passing of their forward, Diogo Jota.

Portugal midfielder Ruben Neves will wear the number 21 jersey of his late friend, Jota, during games for the national team and has revealed a tattoo on his left calf in honour of the former Liverpool striker, who died in July.

“I and the entire national team will do everything we can to keep Diogo here with us, on our team,” Neves said late Tuesday at a ceremony at Portugal’s training base held ahead of the team’s World Cup qualifiers against Armenia and Hungary. Republic of Ireland are the other team in Group F

Jota and his brother, Andre Silva, died in a car accident on July 3.

Neves, who plays for Al Hilal in Saudi Arabia, was very close to Jota – they played together at English club Wolverhampton and Portugal – and spoke on behalf of the Portugal squad about his former teammate at the ceremony, which was also attended by Cristiano Ronaldo, Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and Luis Montenegro, the recently appointed prime minister.

The Portuguese federation posted a video on X of Neves with a tattoo that shows him embracing Jota, who was wearing the number 21 jersey.

𝗡𝗮𝗱𝗮 𝗡𝗼𝘀 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗿. Por ti, Diogo Jota 🤍 pic.twitter.com/Qy56zijvNP

— Portugal (@selecaoportugal) September 2, 2025

Tuesday’s ceremony was also a tribute to Jorge Costa, the former Portugal international who died last month of cardiac arrest.

Pedro Proenca, president of the Portuguese Football Federation, described Jota and Costa as men “who loved football; who loved their country; who loved their national team; men who defended, with courage and dedication, the colours of our flag”.

Jota and Costa were posthumously honoured as Commanders of the Order of Merit and awarded medals, which were accepted by family members.

The federation said the squad was made up of “23 (+1)” players – in another nod to the memory of Jota.

Why have Portugal not played any World Cup qualifiers yet?

Portugal, along with 23 other teams, are only joining the qualifying programme for the World Cup now due to the progress of some of the top seeds in the 2025 Nations League, which culminated in June.

Portugal were crowned champions as they beat Spain 5-3 on penalties in the 2025 final.

Portugal beat Germany in the semifinal, while Spain overcame France. The rest of the qualifiers for the latter stages of that tournament are also only entering the World Cup qualifiers now.

Head-to-head

This is the seventh meeting between the countries, with four Portugal wins and two draws recorded previously.

The last meeting came in a Euro qualifier in 2015, which the Portuguese won 3-2 in Armenia.

Armenia team news

Narek Grigoryan is injured, while Norberto Briasco misses out due to a family issue.

Lucas Zelarayan and Grant-Leon Ranos are both, however, back in the first-team plans.

Portugal team news

Rafael Leao is out with a calf injury, while Diogo Dalot has a muscle problem and has been forced to withdraw.

Cristiano Ronaldo has scored five goals in four games against Armenia, including a hat-trick in the last meeting between the sides.

Armenia predicted starting lineup

Cancarevic; Hovhannisyan, Mkrtchyan, Arutyunyan, Muradyan, Tiknizyan; Iwu, Dashyan; Bichakhchyan, Zelarayan; Barseghyan

Portugal predicted starting lineup

Costa; Cancelo, Dias, A. Silva, Mendes; Fernandes, R. Neves, Bernardo; Conceicao, Ronaldo, Neto

The Russian Federation resumes its invasion of Ukraine with little concern for the country’s sanctions, loss of soft power, and numerous military losses. Despite spending much of 2025 attempting to decouple Russia from China, the Kremlin has not reciprocated with goodwill to the Trump Administration. Instead, Moscow continues to stall negotiations to buy time to complete its military objectives.

Instead, Moscow can be brought under pressure for a negotiated settlement or full military withdrawal from Ukraine by limiting Russian influence as much as possible through its defense alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). A coalition that is thinly held together, CSTO has increasingly fractured in Moscow’s orbit, and the West has a chance to pressure the Russian government by isolating Russia from its own military alliance.

Ongoing Attempts to End the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Against the backdrop of Donald Trump assuming the presidency for the second time, the Administration has made a key goal to try to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine as quickly as possible. Originally trying to decouple Russia from China, the Administration attempted to bring the Kremlin to the negotiating table by voting against a United Nations resolution condemning the invasion, reducing weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and applying more pressure on Kyiv than Moscow.

Instead, Washington has found itself at a crossroads as the Kremlin has continued an aggressive posture, even when the U.S. government publicly ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an attempt to bring Moscow to the table.

The Alaska Summit was intended to find a close solution to ending the war in Ukraine—potentially frozen lines akin to those on the Korean Peninsula, without guaranteed NATO membership for Kyiv. Still, Moscow’s demands included no Western troops providing peacekeeping, full sanctions lifting, and the entirety of the Donbas region, which Russian forces still do not control fully, including the remaining fortress cities under Ukrainian control.

Seeking options to finally bring Moscow to concrete talks, the U.S. and Western governments should utilize their global soft power by decoupling countries long considered Russian vassals and helping them grow more independent of Russia.

Russia is Losing Control of Its Former Sphere of Influence

During the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has suffered militarily and diplomatically. Countries that were initially hesitant to upset the Kremlin have begun to reassess their relations with Moscow, including some CSTO member states.

Formed in 2002, the CSTO comprises Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia as its member states. However, not all members of CSTO have been synchronized and on the same page.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have experienced numerous border clashes due to the Soviet Union’s reconfiguration of their perimeter. Belarus and Armenia are engrossed in a diplomatic conflict, and Kazakhstan has pushed back against Russia’s historical revisionism, moving closer to China. Furthermore, due to numerous inactions taken by Russia during the Second Karabakh War, Armenia has not only strained relations with the former but also limited their participation in CSTO.

Outside of the CSTO, Russia has also suffered military setbacks and lost influence in certain parts of Africa and the Middle East. Russian mercenaries are taking heavy casualties in the Sahel with their junta allies in Mali and Sudan on the back foot against jihadists, Tuareg separatists, and the Sudanese army, respectively.

Against the backdrop of the collapse of the Ba’athist Syrian military, Russia would lose its strategically important naval base in Tartus and its only military stronghold in the Middle East. Without Syria, not only is Russia’s Mediterranean fleet limited in maritime maneuvers, but also the shadow fleet of tankers will not have a key base to dock and export fuel to continue the Kremlin’s war effort.

How to Bring CSTO Nations into the Fold

Russia’s costly and miscalculated invasion and prolonged occupation have only isolated the country into a de facto vassal status of China. With waning Russian influence, the West can use rapprochement policies towards CSTO countries to decouple them from the Kremlin’s orbit.

In Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan have developed closer relations with China and Turkey; however, pivotal Western policies, such as the United States’ promotion of sovereignty without Russian interference in 2023, have also played an integral role in enhancing relations in the region. President Trump could continue advancing this Biden Administration policy that further sidesteps Russia while ongoing trade negotiations continue.

In the South Caucasus, the economic corridor submitted between Azerbaijan and Armenia as part of a planned peace agreement has excluded Russia from the finalized documents. The Trump Administration scored a key diplomatic victory after years of the U.S. government’s rapprochement with Armenia following the 2020 war.

France has played a key role in American relations in the South Caucasus, as Paris is at the forefront of limiting Russian influence in the region, as Moscow has done the same towards French soft power in Africa. With Armenia’s government showing signs of wanting to transform into a full Western democracy with potential European Union membership, the U.S. should, in the future, promote Yerevan towards non-NATO ally status.

Regarding Belarus, its armed forces have shot down more Russian drones than NATO during the ongoing invasion. Alexander Lukashenko, the longtime leader of Belarus, arguably sticks close to Russia after decades of isolation from Europe due to his authoritarian policies.

Nevertheless, the West could initiate a slow and gradual process of rapprochement with Belarus—neither lifting sanctions, but offering Lukashenko amnesty and potential exile in a comfortable villa if the Belarusian autocrat promotes democratic norms and gradually drifts away from Russia.

Utilizing soft power, not just through sanctions, is a policy the West can use going forward to apply pressure on Russia. With Moscow’s drifting soft power in several regions while relations with CSTO continue to drift, the United States and Europe have an opportunity for rapprochement to isolate the Kremlin further and bring the Russian government to get serious in negotiations for their invasion of Ukraine, finally.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says in Yerevan that ‘governance in the Caucasus region must remain Caucasian’.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has told Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian that a planned corridor linking Azerbaijan with its exclave would be under Armenian control, days after Iran said it would block the project included in a United States-brokered peace accord that puts a potential Washington presence on its doorstep.

“Roads passing through Armenia will be under the exclusive jurisdiction of Armenia, and security will be provided by Armenia, not by any third country,” Pashinyan said at a meeting with Pezeshkian in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Tuesday. He added that the corridor would open new economic perspectives between the two countries, and could offer a rail route from Iran to the Black Sea coast through Armenia.

The land corridor, dubbed the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP), is part of a deal signed this month in Washington between former foes Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Under the agreement, the US will hold development rights for the proposed route, which would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave bordering Iran and Turkey.

“Governance in the Caucasus region must remain Caucasian – outsourcing the resolution of Caucasus issues to extra-regional forces will complicate it,” Pezeshkian said during his visit on Tuesday. “Iran’s position has always been to reject any changes to international borders in the Caucasus region.”

Iran has long opposed the planned transit route, also known as the Zangezur corridor, fearing it would cut the country off from Armenia and the rest of the Caucasus while bringing potentially hostile foreign forces close to its borders.

Since the deal was signed on August 8, Iranian officials have stepped up warnings to Armenia, saying the project could be part of a US ploy “to pursue hegemonic goals in the Caucasus region”.

The proposed corridor has been hailed as beneficial by other countries in the region, including Russia, with which Iran has a strategic alliance alongside Armenia.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia. Azerbaijan Baku took control of the territory in a military operation in 2023, leading to an exodus of the ethnic Armenian population.

Armenia last year agreed to return several villages to Azerbaijan in what Baku described as a “long-awaited historic event”.

Iran rejects ‘Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity’ (TRIPP), says the presence of American companies in the region would be ‘worrying’.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is visiting Armenia for talks on a planned corridor linking Azerbaijan near the border with his country, days after Iran said it would block the project included in a United States-brokered peace accord that puts a potential Washington presence on Iran’s doorstep.

The land corridor, dubbed the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP), is part of a deal signed earlier this month in Washington between former foes Armenia and Azerbaijan.

US President Donald Trump said the deal granted the US exclusive developmental rights to the transport corridor. Washington was also signing bilateral agreements with both countries to increase cooperation in areas like energy, trade and technology, including artificial intelligence.

Before departing for the Armenian capital Yerevan on Monday, Pezeshkian described the possible presence of American companies in the region as “worrying.”

“We will discuss it [with Armenian officials] and express our concerns,” he told state television.

The proposed route would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave, passing near the Iranian border. Tehran has long opposed the planned transit route, also known as the Zangezur corridor, fearing it would cut the country off from Armenia and the rest of the Caucasus while bringing potentially hostile foreign forces close to its borders.

Since the deal was signed on August 8, Iranian officials have stepped up warnings to Armenia, saying the project could be part of a US ploy “to pursue hegemonic goals in the Caucasus region”.

On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described it as a “sensitive” issue, saying Tehran’s main concern is that it could “lead to geopolitical changes in the region”.

“They [Armenian officials] have assured us that no American forces … or American security companies will be present in Armenia under the pretext of this route,” he told the official IRNA news agency.

The proposed corridor has been hailed as beneficial by other countries in the region including Russia, with which Iran has a strategic alliance alongside Armenia.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said Tehran would block the initiative “with or without Russia”.

Trump “thinks the Caucasus is a piece of real estate he can lease for 99 years”, Velayati told state-affiliated Tasnim News soon after the deal was signed, adding that the area would become “a graveyard for Trump’s mercenaries”.

Moscow cautiously welcomed the deal, saying that it supported efforts to promote stability and prosperity in the region. Similarly to Iran, however, it warned against outside intervention, arguing that lasting solutions should be developed by countries in the region.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia. Azerbaijan Baku took control of the territory in a military operation in 2023, leading to an exodus of the ethnic Armenian population.

Armenia last year agreed to return several villages to Azerbaijan in what Baku described as a “long-awaited historic event”.

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, his late father and predecessor Heydar Aliyev and some of their closest political allies hail from Nakhchivan.

The name of this tiny, mountainous and underdeveloped Azeri area sandwiched between Armenia, Iran and Turkiye sounds unfamiliar to those outside the strategic South Caucasus region.

But Nakhchivan’s name and geopolitical significance resurfaced after United States President Donald Trump hosted a White House summit between Azeri and Armenian leaders on Friday.

Azerbaijan’s Aliyev and the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a preliminary peace deal to end the decades-long conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

In the early 1990s, ethnic Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region broke away from oil-rich Azerbaijan after a war that killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Moscow brokered a truce in 1994, maintaining two military bases in resource-poor Armenia, supplying it with cheap energy while selling arms to Azerbaijan.

Even though the conflict did not involve Nakhchivan, it cut off the Zangezur Corridor, a 40km (25-mile) logistical umbilical cord to Azeri mainland that consists of a derelict road and parallel rusty rail tracks.

Air travel and hours-long, bumpy transit through Iran remained the only way to reach the exclave, whose authorities ruled it like a personal fiefdom, with laws and ways of life often contradicting those of the mainland.

After winning the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh and restoring control over it three years later, Baku has been eager to revive the corridor, demanding its exterritoriality and even pondering the use of military force.

‘A new reality in the region’

The reasons go far beyond restoring access to Aliyev’s ancestral land. The corridor could become a mammoth transport hub between Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

It may increase the flow of Central Asian hydrocarbons to Turkiye and further to Europe, boost the regional economy – and upend Russia’s two centuries of domination in the region that also includes Georgia.

Armenia was reluctant to allow Azeri access to the corridor, fearing that the emboldened Turkish-Azeri tandem may jeopardise its security.

But Trump cut through the Gordian knot on Friday, and his role “essentially, cements a new reality in the region”, according to Emil Mustafayev, the Baku-based chief editor of the Minval Politika online magazine.

“This is a serious shift in the security architecture and transport logistics of the South Caucasus,” he told Al Jazeera.

While in the White House, Aliyev and Pashinyan lavished Trump with praise and nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

“What cracked me up is that [they] didn’t lose their way about how one has to communicate in Washington,” Andrey Kazantsev, an expert on the region, told Al Jazeera.

They also flattered Trump by naming the corridor the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) and leasing it to Washington for up to 99 years with exclusive development rights.

What looks like one of Trump’s favourite real estate deals actually heralds a tectonic shift.

“Trump’s administration has indeed been quick to find its way towards the long-due geopolitical pivot,” Kazantsev said.

China, which has been promoting its Belt and Road Initiative in Asia and Eastern Europe, may remain “neutral” to it, and Russia, which has two military bases in Armenia, may “ignore it, at least, publicly”, he said. “But for Iran, it’s a real blow.”

‘A boost of Washington’s clout’

To guard the TRIPP, Washington may use a private military company – and eventually build a military base that nominally safeguards Armenia but actually keeps an eye on Iran, said Ukrainian political analyst Aleksey Kushch.

“It means more potential pressure on Iran and a boost of Washington’s clout in the resource-rich Caspian region where US oil companies made sizeable investments” in the 1990s, he said.

And Moscow is also about to lose a lot.

“No matter how paradoxical it sounds, it’s Moscow that has been and still is a decisive factor in the peace settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in solving the latter’s problem of accessing Nakhchivan,” said Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a think tank in London.

“One of the main motives for rapprochement of both sides is their push to get rid of Moscow’s influence, of the peacekeeper’s role it has imposed on them,” he told Al Jazeera.

The new deal “only highlights how fictitious Moscow’s role as peacekeeper and middleman in peace settlement in the South Caucasus is”, Ilkhamov said.

However, the deal is not yet set in stone, and the Trump-hosted summit “sparked premature optimism”, said Kevork Oskanian of the University of Exeter, in the United Kingdom.

This optimism “should be tempered by realism and historical precedent [as] many peace processes have failed despite promising starts”, he told Al Jazeera.

A deal not yet done

Baku, whose annual $5bn defence spending exceeds Yerevan’s entire debt-hobbled state budget, affirmed Armenia’s territorial integrity but did not withdraw from some 200sq km (77sq miles) of its land.

The TRIPP’s concept avoids Baku’s demand for the corridor’s extraterritoriality, balancing sovereignty with strategic access, Oskanian said.

But there are also questions as to whether Washington’s initiatives are “a principled intervention or opportunistic geopolitics”, he added.

Even without direct confrontation, Moscow and Tehran could try to undermine the deal.

“Their grudging acquiescence is essential – but far from guaranteed,” Oskanian said.

Iran threatened on Saturday that the TRIPP “will not become a gateway for Trump’s mercenaries – it will become their graveyard”.

Armenia is a democracy “polarised” over the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and Pashinyan’s conflict with the Armenian Apostolic Church, Oskanian said.

To finalise the peace deal, Pashinyan would need to hold a referendum amending Armenia’s constitution that mentions the “reunification” with Nagorno-Karabakh – and win the 2026 parliamentary vote.

Therefore, the success of Trump’s deal depends on many intricacies of South Caucasus politics – and the West “must engage with nuance – not just geopolitics”, Oskanian concluded.

There is a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia, after nearly four decades of conflict.

The final stage was brokered by US President Donald Trump in the White House.

Crucial to the deal is a corridor to connect the main part of Azerbaijan with another part of its territory, which is cut off because it is on the other side of Armenia.

But how long will it take before the corridor becomes a reality?

And what will Washington’s growing presence in the South Caucasus mean for the region?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Vasif Huseynov – Head of department at the Center of Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center)

Jamila Mammadova – Research assistant at the Henry Jackson Society

Vahram Ter-Matevosyan – Political analyst

Iran has said it will block a corridor planned in the Caucasus under a United States-brokered peace accord between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which has been hailed by other countries in the region as beneficial for achieving lasting peace.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said on Saturday that Tehran would block the initiative “with or without Russia”, with which Iran has a strategic alliance alongside Armenia.

US President Donald Trump “thinks the Caucasus is a piece of real estate he can lease for 99 years”, Velayati told state-affiliated Tasnim News, referring to the transport corridor included in the peace deal.

“This passage will not become a gateway for Trump’s mercenaries — it will become their graveyard,” he added, describing the plan as “political treachery” aimed at undermining Armenia’s territorial integrity.

The terms of the accord, which was unveiled at a signing ceremony at the White House on Friday, include exclusive US development rights to a route through Armenia that would link Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani enclave that borders Baku’s ally Turkiye.

The corridor, which would pass close to the border with Iran, would be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP, and operate under Armenian law.

Velayati argued that it would open the way for NATO to position itself “like a viper” between Iran and Russia.

Separately, Iran’s foreign ministry issued a statement expressing concern about the negative consequences of any foreign intervention in the vicinity of its borders.

While it welcomed the peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the ministry said any project near Iran’s borders should be developed “with respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and without foreign interference”.

For its part, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cautiously welcomed the deal, saying on Saturday that Moscow supported efforts to promote stability and prosperity in the region, including the Washington meeting.

Similarly to Iran, however, it warned against outside intervention, arguing that lasting solutions should be developed by countries in the region.

“The involvement of non-regional players should strengthen the peace agenda, not create new divisions,” the ministry said, adding that it hoped to avoid the “unfortunate experience” of Western-led conflict resolution in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Turkiye on Saturday said it hoped the planned transit corridor would boost exports of energy and other resources through the South Caucasus.

A NATO member, Turkiye has strongly backed Azerbaijan in its conflicts with Armenia, but has pledged to restore ties with Yerevan after it signs a final peace deal with Baku.

The Turkish presidency said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the peace agreement with Ilham Aliyev, his counterpart from Azerbaijan, and offered Ankara’s support in achieving lasting peace in the region.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan also addressed the planned corridor during a visit to Egypt, saying it could “link Europe with the depths of Asia via Turkiye” and would be “a very beneficial development”.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.

Armenia last year agreed to return several villages to Azerbaijan in what Baku described as a “long-awaited historic event”.

Ahmad Shahidov, of the Azerbaijan Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, told Al Jazeera that he expected a final peace declaration between Armenia and Azerbaijan to be signed in the coming weeks.

Shahidov said Friday’s US-brokered deal constituted a “roadmap” for the final agreement, which appears imminent given there are no unresolved territorial disputes between the two neighbours.

US president says the deal will bring peace and new economic opportunities for the two rivals, but issues remain.

United States President Donald Trump has hosted his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the White House for the signing of a peace treaty between the two longtime rivals.

The US president said during a ceremony on Friday that he believed the two men would have a “great relationship” and that the agreement would bring peace and new economic opportunities to the region.

“I want to congratulate these two great people, Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev, for coming to Washington to sign this momentous joint declaration,” Trump said.

“The countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan are committing to stop all fighting forever; open up commerce, travel and diplomatic relations; and respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Aliyev echoed Trump’s statements, saying that the deal marked the start of a “long-lasting peace, eternal peace in the Caucasus”.

“ There should be no doubts and no suspicions that any of the sides would step back. If any of us — Prime Minister Pashinyan or myself — had in mind to step back, we wouldn’t have come here,” Aliyev said.

The agreement will create a transportation corridor between the two countries, which have been embroiled in territorial disputes since the disintegration of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.

Those wars were largely fought over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is within Azerbaijan’s borders but was previously populated by ethnic Armenians.

They were ultimately expelled en masse during an Azerbaijani offensive in 2023.

The deal grants the US exclusive developmental rights to the transport corridor, which will be dubbed the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity”.

“We anticipate significant infrastructure development by American companies. They’re very anxious to go into these two countries,” Trump said.

He added that the US was also signing bilateral agreements with both countries to increase cooperation in areas like energy, trade and technology, including artificial intelligence.

The deals would also lift previous restrictions on security coordination with Azerbaijan, which has faced scrutiny over its human rights record.

“I’m very grateful to the president that he lifted the restrictions that had been imposed on Azerbaijan back in 1992,” said Aliyev.

While Trump has hailed the agreement as a diplomatic breakthrough and an opportunity for economic engagement, it is viewed with bitterness by many Armenians.

During Azerbaijan’s 2023 military campaign, the country sought to bring Nagorno-Karabakh under its control.

But that military offensive involved a brutal siege that rights groups say amounted to the restriction of food as a weapon of war. The conflict culminated in the forcible expulsion of the territory’s ethnic Armenian population.

Images of displaced Armenians fleeing with their possessions recalled painful memories of what many consider the “Armenian Genocide”, which took place from 1915 to 1923.

Azerbaijan maintains that the campaign was necessary to restore order in a territory within its borders and that Armenians could have stayed in their homes.

“Erasing Nagorno-Karabakh is not peace,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said in a statement on Thursday, saying the agreement had been reached “at gunpoint”.

“Normalising ethnic cleansing is not peace.”

Armenia and Azerbaijan’s leaders met in the UAE last month, but no breakthrough in their decades-long conflict was reached.

United States President Donald Trump will host the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan for peace talks at the White House, a US official said.

The official told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday that there is a possibility a framework for a peace agreement could be announced at Friday’s meeting in Washington, DC.

The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, for peace talks last month, but no breakthrough in the decades-old conflict was announced.

The two South Caucasus countries have been in conflict with each other since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.

The region, which was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time.

Azerbaijan recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, prompting almost all of the territory’s 100,000 Armenians to flee to Armenia.

Armenia has accused Azerbaijan of “erasing all traces” of the presence of ethnic Armenians in the contested territory, in a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The case stems from the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh, which left more than 6,600 people dead, one of three full-scale wars that the two countries have fought over the region.

The United Nations’s top court has ordered Azerbaijan to allow ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh to return. Azerbaijan says it is committed to ensuring all residents’ safety and security, regardless of national or ethnic origin, and that it has not forced ethnic Armenians, who are mostly Christian, to leave the Karabakh region.

Azerbaijan, whose inhabitants are mostly Muslim, links its historical identity to the territory, too, and has accused the Armenians of driving out Azeris who lived near the region in the 1990s.

The meeting in Abu Dhabi last month between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev came after the two countries finalised a draft peace deal in March.

The two leaders “agreed to continue bilateral negotiations and confidence-building measures between the two countries”, but no more concrete steps were outlined in the final statement from the talks.

Ceasefire violations along the heavily militarised 1,000km (620-mile) shared Armenia-Azerbaijan border surged soon after the draft deal was announced in March, but later diminished.

When a country like Armenia sends a film out into the world, it’s not just art. It’s a way to preserve memory, to reach a scattered diaspora. Each film offers the world stories that might otherwise be forgotten. So when President Trump proposes a 100% tariff on all films “produced in foreign lands,” the damage isn’t limited to foreign competitors or outsourcing studios. It threatens to shut out small nations like Armenia, for whom cinema is a lifeline.

The proposal hasn’t taken effect — yet. But July 9 marked a turning point in Trump’s broader tariff agenda, with a deadline for reimposing sweeping trade penalties on countries deemed “unfair.” While the situation for films remains unclear, the proposal alone has done damage and continues to haunt the industry. The tariff idea arises from the worldview that treats international exchange as a threat — and cultural expression as just another import to tax.

Take “Amerikatsi” (2022), the extraordinary recent movie by Emmy-winning actor and director Michael A. Goorjian. Inspired by his grandfather’s escape from the Armenian genocide — smuggled across the ocean in a crate — the project is not just a movie; it’s a universal story rooted in the Armenian experience, made possible by international collaboration and driven by a deep personal mission. Goorjian filmed it in Armenia with local crews, including people who, months later, would find themselves on the front lines of war. One was killed. Others were injured. Still, they sent him videos from the trenches saying all they wanted was to return to the set. That is the spirit a tariff like this would crush.

Armenia is a democracy in a dangerous neighborhood. Its history is riddled with trauma — genocide, war, occupation — and its present is haunted by threats from neighboring authoritarian regimes. But even as bombs fall and borders close, its people create. Films like “Aurora’s Sunrise” (2022) and “Should the Wind Drop” (2020) carry voices across oceans, turning pain into poetry, history into cinema. These films don’t rely on wide releases. They depend on arthouses, festivals, streamers and distributors with the courage and curiosity to take a chance. A 100% tariff would devastate that.

Indeed, the ripple effects of such a tariff would upend the entire global film ecosystem. Modern cinema is inherently international: A Georgian director might work with a French editor, an American actor and a German financier.

So sure, many American films use crew and facilities in Canada. But international co-productions are a growing cornerstone of the global film industry, particularly in Europe. Belgium produces up to 72% of its films in partnership with foreign nations, often France. Other notable co-production leaders include Luxembourg (45% with France), Slovakia (38% with Czechia) and Switzerland (31% with France). These partnerships are often driven by shared language, which is why the U.S. is also frequently involved in co-productions with Britain as well as Canada. Israel too has leaned into this model, using agreements with countries such as France, Germany and Canada to gain access to international audiences and funding mechanisms.

The U.S. government cannot unmake this system and should not try to do so. To penalize “foreign-made” films is to punish Americans too — artists, producers and distributors who thrive on collaboration. You can’t build a wall around storytelling.

Supporters of the tariff argue it protects American workers. But Hollywood is already one of the most globalized industries on Earth, and the idea that it suffers from too many foreign films is absurd. If anything, it suffers from too few. The result of this policy won’t be a thriving domestic market — but a quieter, flatter, more parochial one. A landscape where the next “Amerikatsi” never gets seen, where a generation of Armenian American youth never discovers their history through a movie screen.

If America still wants to lead in the 21st century — not just militarily and economically but morally — it should lead through culture and avoid isolation.

Stories like “Amerikatsi” remind us why that matters. A film that begins with a boy smuggled in a crate across the ocean ends with a message of joy and resilience. That’s not just Armenian history — it’s American history too. It cannot be separated. Unless we want that kind of storytelling priced out of our cinemas (and off our streaming platforms), we must keep the doors open.

For America to turn its back on stories like these would be a betrayal of everything film can be. And it would impoverish American society too. That way lies not greatness but provinciality.

Alexis Alexanian is a New York City-based film producer, consultant and educator whose credits include “A League of Their Own” and “Pieces of April.” She is a past president of New York Women in Film & Television and sits on the board of BAFTA North America.

Draft deal to end bitter decades-long conflict agreed 4 months ago, but timeline for sealing it remains uncertain.

The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan are holding peace talks in the United Arab Emirates after nearly four decades of conflict.

The meeting in Abu Dhabi on Thursday between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, confirmed by both their governments, comes after the two countries finalised a draft peace deal in March.

The South Caucasus countries have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.

Peace talks began after Azerbaijan recaptured Karabakh in a lightning offensive in September 2023, prompting a huge exodus of almost all of the territory’s 100,000 Armenians, who fled to Armenia.

But the timeline for sealing a deal remains uncertain.

Ceasefire violations along the heavily militarised 1,000km (620-mile) shared border surged soon after the draft deal was announced, though there have been no reported violations recently.

In a potential stumbling block to a deal, Azerbaijan has said it wants Armenia to change its constitution, which it says makes implicit claims to Azerbaijani territory.

Yerevan denies this, but Pashinyan has repeatedly stressed in recent months – most recently this week – that the South Caucasus country’s founding charter needs to be updated.

Azerbaijan also asked for a transport corridor through Armenia, linking the bulk of its territory to Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani enclave that borders Baku’s ally, Turkiye.

Pashinyan and Aliyev’s last encounter was in May, on the sidelines of the European Political Community summit in Tirana, Albania.

In June, Pashinyan made a rare visit to Istanbul to hold talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a meeting Armenia described as a “historic” step towards regional peace.

This week, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed hope for a swift peace deal between the Caucasus neighbours.

The outbreak of hostilities between the two countries in the late 1980s prompted mass expulsions of hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim Azeris from Armenia, and Armenians, who are majority Christian, from Azerbaijan.

A confrontation between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Armenia’s top Christian clerics seems to be deepening, polarising the deeply religious South Caucasus nation of 3 million.

St Echmiadzin, the Armenian Apostolic Church’s headquarters, has been “taken over by the anti-Christian, immoral, antinational and antistate group and has to be liberated”, Pashinyan wrote on Facebook on Tuesday, adding: “I will lead this liberation.”

The dispute escalated late last month, with bells ringing tocsin over St Echmiadzin on June 27.

Usually, the loud and alarming sound signals an event of significance, such as a foreign invasion.

But on that parching-hot June day, the noise rang out to signal the detention of a top cleric who, according to Pashinyan, was part of a “criminal-oligarchic clergy” that was involved in “terrorism” and plotted a “coup”.

He said the “coup organisers” include the Church’s head, Karekin II, who has disputed with Pashinyan in a months-long personal feud.

But the conflict should not be seen as a confrontation between secular authorities and the entire Church, observers said.

“It’s a personal clash,” Richard Giragosian of the Regional Studies Center think tank based in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, told Al Jazeera.

But some Armenians still described the furore in almost apocalyptic terms.

“We lost our statehood so many times, so being part of the Church was equal to being Armenian,” Narine Malikyan, a 37-year-old mother of two from Armenia’s second-largest city of Guymri, told Al Jazeera. “Attacking the Church is like attacking every Armenian.”

The Church, whose doctrine differs from that of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox sees, has for centuries helped maintain the identity of Armenians while their lands were ruled by Iranians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Turks and Russians.

‘The Karabakh clan’

The conflict between Pashinyan and Karekin is rooted in the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended a decades-old “frozen conflict”.

In the early 1990s, Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous Azeri enclave dominated by ethnic Armenians, broke away in a bloody war that uprooted up to a million.

Moscow-backed separatist leaders from Nagorno-Karabakh became part of Armenia’s political elite and cultivated ties with the Church.

The so-called “Karabakh clan” spawned two presidents who ruled Armenia for 20 years but were accused of corruption, cronyism and pocketing donations from Armenian diasporas in France, the United States and Russia.

In 2018, Pashinyan, an ex-lawmaker and popular publicist, led huge protests that toppled the “Karabakh clan”. He became prime minister with approval ratings of more than 80 percent.

Some protesters back then flocked to St Echmiadzin to urge Karekin to step down as they lambasted his penchant for luxurious cars and lavish parties.

‘An illegitimate child’

Two years later, Armenia lost Nagorno-Karabakh in a 44-day war that proved the superiority of drone attacks and hi-tech stratagems.

By 2023, Azerbaijan regained control of the entire Dubai-sized territory, while tens of thousands of its residents flocked to Armenia.

Karekin blamed Pashinyan for the defeat, even though observers have argued that the responsibility lies with his predecessors’s miscalculations.

Pashinyan struck back.

He claimed that 73-year-old Karekin – who was ordained in 1970, studied theology in Austria, Germany and Moscow and became the Church’s head in 1999, broke his vow of celibacy to father a child – and should, therefore, vacate his seat.

“If Karekin II tries to denounce this fact, I’ll prove it in all necessary ways,” Pashinyan wrote on Facebook on June 9.

He did not specify the details, but Armenian media “discovered” that Karekin’s alleged daughter is a medical doctor in Yerevan.

Karekin did not respond to the claim but accused Pashinyan of dividing Armenians.

“The anti-clerical campaign unleashed by authorities is a serious threat to our national unity, domestic stability and is a direct blow to our statehood,” the grey-bearded clergyman, clad in a ceremonial robe adorned with crosses, said on June 22 at a ceremony at St Echmiadzin.

A day later, a priest called Pashinyan “Judas” and claimed he was circumcised.

Pashinyan retorted by offering to expose himself to the priest and Karekin.

A failed detention

On June 27, dozens of intelligence officers interrupted a conference in one of St Echmiadzin’s tawny, centuries-old buildings to forcibly deliver another Pashinyan critic, Archbishop Mikael Adjapakhyan, to an interrogation.

But priests and parishioners summoned by the tocsin fought them off – while critics compared the incident to the 1938 killing of Armenia’s top cleric in St Echmiadzin during the Soviet-era crackdown on religion.

Hours later, Archbishop Adjapakhyan volunteered for an interrogation, telling supporters that he “was being persecuted illegally”.

He was arrested for two months – along with 14 alleged “coup organisers,” including another archbishop, Bagrat Galstanyan, opposition lawmakers and “Karabakh clan” figures.

The coup was supposed to take place on September 21, on Armenia’s Independence Day, according to its plan leaked to the Civic.am daily.

Also arrested was construction tycoon Samvel Karapetyan, who made his estimated $3.6bn fortune in Russia and owns Armenia’s main power company.

Karapetyan had threatened Pashinyan, saying if the conflict with Karekin is not solved, “we will take part in it all in our own way.”

The arrests were “a move by the Armenian government to preempt any potential Russian interference in the coming [parliamentary] elections that are set for June 2026”, analyst Giragosian said.

‘Pashinyan is hard to negotiate with’

Those opposed to Pashinyan’s Civil Contract Party have accused him of siding with Azerbaijan and Turkiye.

But Baku has its qualms about Pashinyan.

“Pashinyan is by far not a peace dove,” Emil Mustafayev, chief editor of the Minval Politika magazine based in the Azeri capital, Baku, told Al Jazeera. “He is hard to negotiate with.”

However, after the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, Pashinyan “began to take heed of Baku’s position”, Mustafayev said. “Of all possible options in Yerevan, he’s the least problematic partner one can have a dialogue with, no matter how complicated it is.”

Analyst Gigarosyan agreed.

“Pashinyan is the best interlocutor [Baku and Ankara] could hope for because of predictability and also because he’s looking to turn the page,” he said. “He’s not looking for revenge.”

And even though Pashinyan’s current approval ratings are well below 20 percent, his party may become a political phoenix and win the June 2026 vote.

Armenian opposition parties are either centred around two former presidents from the “Karabakh clan” who are deeply mistrusted, or are too small and splintered to form sizeable coalitions and influence decision-making in the unicameral, 107-seat parliament.

“They’re likely to win,” Giragosian said of Pashinyan’s party. “Not because of a strong degree of support, but because the opposition is hated and feared more.”

Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, a leader in protests against the PM, is accused of a plot to overthrow the government.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan says security officials have thwarted a coup plot involving a leading cleric from Armenia’s national church.

The arrest of Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, leader of the opposition movement Holy Struggle, on Wednesday marks a sharp escalation in Pashinyan’s standoff with the leadership of the powerful Apostolic Church.

The church’s leader, Catholicos Garegin II, has called for Pashinyan’s resignation after Armenia lost a war to Azerbaijan in 2020, while Galstanyan, the primate of the Diocese of Tavush, led mass protests last year, aiming to unseat the prime minister, channelling widespread public anger over military defeats and territorial concessions to Azerbaijan.

“Law enforcement officers prevented a large and sinister plan by the ‘criminal-oligarchic clergy’ to destabilize the Republic of Armenia and seize power,” Pashinyan wrote on Facebook on Wednesday, sharing a statement by Armenia’s Investigative Committee.

The committee said it had filed criminal charges against Galstanyan and 15 others, who they said had “acquired the means and tools necessary to commit a terrorist attack and seize power”.

A total of 14 people had been arrested, investigators said, without naming them.

The committee’s statement claimed that Galstanyan — who has previously expressed his desire to replace Pashinyan as prime minister, although he is unable to hold office due to being a dual Armenian-Canadian citizen — sought to overthrow the government with the help of his supporters.

It said the group had recruited about 1,000 people, mainly former soldiers and police officers, and divided them into strike groups, assigning each a task to destabilise the country, by blocking roads, inciting violence or blocking the internet.

It claimed that the group had acquired weapons, explosives, and other dangerous materials in preparation for the plot.

It said searches were under way at the homes of Galstanyan and about 30 of his associates.

The committee also published audio recordings purporting to reveal Galstanyan and others discussing plans for the alleged coup plot.

‘We are coming’

News.am, an Armenian news website, published footage of Galstanyan being taken from his house into a car by masked police officers, and driven away.

“Evil, listen carefully – whatever you do, you have very little time left. Hold on, we are coming,” he said, in an apparent reference to Pashinyan, as a crowd outside shouted “Nikol is a traitor”, the AFP news agency reported.

A lawmaker close to Galstanyan, Garnik Danielyan, said the raids were “actions of a dictatorial regime” and said the accusations against the archbishop were fabricated, AFP reported.

Wednesday’s developments follow the arrest of another prominent government opponent earlier this month, when Russian-Armenian real estate billionaire Samvel Karapetyan was detained on accusations of making public calls to usurp power, the Reuters news agency reported.

Divided nation

Armenia’s humiliating military defeat by Azerbaijan, resulting in the 2023 loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist enclave in Azerbaijan, has left bitter divisions in Armenia, notably between Pashinyan and the Apostolic Church.

Earlier this month, Pashinyan unsuccessfully attempted to oust Garegin II as the head of the church, calling on the faithful to elect a new spiritual leader to “liberate” the church, AFP reported.

Russia, a treaty ally of Armenia, said the alleged coup plot was an internal matter for Yerevan, but had an interest in calm and order being maintained, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Nikol Pashinyan’s visit marks Ankara and Yerevan’s second attempt at reconciliation.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is on a rare visit to Istanbul to hold talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in what Yerevan has described as a “historic” step towards regional peace.

The visit forms part of the two countries’ efforts to normalise ties strained over historical disputes and Ankara’s alliance with Azerbaijan, which has been in a long-simmering conflict with Armenia.

“This is a historic visit, as it will be the first time a head of the Republic of Armenia visits Turkiye at this level. All regional issues will be discussed,” Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonyan told reporters on Friday. “The risks of war [with Azerbaijan] are currently minimal, and we must work to neutralise them. Pashinyan’s visit to Turkiye is a step in that direction.”

Pashinyan’s visit comes a day after Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held talks in Turkiye with Erdogan, during which he praised the Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance as “a significant factor, not only regionally but also globally”, and Erdogan reiterated his support for “the establishment of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia”.

Baku and Yerevan agreed on the text of a peace deal in March, but Baku has since outlined a host of demands, including changes to Armenia’s constitution, that it wants met before it will sign the document.

Pashinyan is scheduled to meet Erdogan at Istanbul’s Dolmabahce Palace at 15:00 GMT, Erdogan’s office said.

An Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs official told the AFP news agency that the pair will discuss efforts to sign a comprehensive peace treaty.

The regional fallout from the Israel-Iran conflict, which began last Friday when Israel launched several waves of air strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities and military sites, will also be discussed.

Armenia and Turkiye have never established formal diplomatic ties, and their shared border has been closed since 1993.

Attempts at normalisation

Relations between the two nations have been historically strained over the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire – atrocities historians and Yerevan say amount to genocide. Turkiye rejects the label, contending that while many people died in that era, the death toll is inflated and the deaths resulted from civil unrest.

Ankara has also backed its close ally, Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan, in the long-running Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia. This region, which had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia in the late 1980s. In 2020, Turkiye backed Azerbaijan in its second war with Armenia, which ended after six weeks with a Russia-brokered peace deal that saw Azerbaijan gain control of a significant part of the region.

Pashinyan has actively sought to normalise relations with both Baku and Ankara.

Ankara and Yerevan appointed special envoys in late 2021 to lead a normalisation process, and resumed commercial flights in 2022 after a two-year pause.

Earlier this year, Pashinyan announced Armenia would halt its campaign for international recognition of the 1915 mass killings of Armenians as genocide – a major concession to Turkiye that sparked widespread criticism at home.

Pashinyan’s first visit to Turkiye was to attend Erdogan’s inauguration in 2023.

This is Ankara and Yerevan’s second attempt at reconciliation. Turkiye and Armenia reached an agreement in 2009 to establish formal relations and open their shared border, but the deal was never ratified because of strong opposition from Azerbaijan.

Armenia has long relied on Russian weapons in its bitter dispute with neighbouring Azerbaijan.

Russia’s top diplomat has blamed the war in Ukraine for affecting the supply of arms to Armenia, and has expressed concern that Moscow’s longstanding ally would now look to the West for military support instead.

Speaking in Yerevan on the second day of a two-day visit to Armenia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that some of Russia’s weapons contracts with the former Soviet republic had been delayed or reassigned due to the pressures created by the war in Ukraine.

Armenia has long relied on Russian weapons in its bitter dispute with neighbouring Azerbaijan, against whom it has fought a series of conflicts since the late 1980s.

“We are currently in a situation where, as has happened throughout history, we are forced to fight all of Europe,” Lavrov said, in a barbed reference to European support for Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion.

“Our Armenian friends understand that in such conditions, we cannot fulfil all our obligations on time.”

As Russia has failed to deliver on weapons contracts paid for by Armenia, Yerevan has increasingly turned to countries like France and India for military supplies.

Lavrov said that Russia would not oppose these growing ties, but said that they raised concerns about its traditional ally’s strategic intentions.

“When an ally turns to a country like France, which leads the hostile camp and whose president and ministers speak openly with hatred toward Russia, it does raise questions,” he said.

Armenia has strengthened its ties with the West amid recent ongoing tensions with Azerbaijan, fallout from the last major eruption of conflict and Russia’s role in that.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military operation to retake Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist enclave in Azerbaijan with a mostly ethnic Armenian population that had broken away from Baku with Armenian support amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Armenia accused Russian peacekeepers of failing to protect the more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians who fled the region, fuelled by decades of distrust, wars, mutual hatred and violence, after Azerbaijan’s lightning takeover.

Yerevan also suspended its involvement in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a Russian-led security umbrella of ex-Soviet countries, last year, saying it would not participate or fund the alliance.