A joint EU-US-Armenia high-level meeting was held in Brussels, Belgium, on April 5, signifying increased European-American push to court Yerevan even as it maintains strong ties with Iran.
Last week’s meeting was attended by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell, USAID Chief Samantha Powell and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, in support of “Armenia’s resilience” financially and otherwise. Yerevan’s pivot to the West is a challenge for Tehran. Nonetheless, Iranian authorities and media kept mum on the trilateral meeting. Instead, some Iranian outlets focused on covering Azerbaijan’s and Russia’s reactions. This raises a curious question of what lies behind the conspicuously unusual Iranian silence.
What Tehran sees in Armenia and South Caucasus?
The meeting took place in a broad historic context, in which Armenia takes significant discursive and practical steps aimed to emancipate itself from military, economic and otherwise over-dependence on Russia. In the Iranian strategic thinking, if Russia were to leave the South Caucasus, it is Iran that must step in. However, the Azerbaijani-Turkish tandem has taken upper hand in benefitting from Russia’s entanglement in the Ukrainian war. This factor combined with Azerbaijan’s defeat of Armenia in the 2020 war has put Tehran’s ambitions at odds with the realities on the ground. Yet the EU civilian monitoring mission was deployed in Armenia in 2022, and Yerevan upgraded the status of the mission by granting diplomatic immunity to the personnel on March 20, 2024.
