Armenia's Pashinyan keeps Iran close while wooing Trump, Turkey and Azerbaijan

YEREVAN, Armenia — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who was reelected for a third term in parliamentary elections last month, was among a handful of leaders to attend the funeral of Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran this week. Until recently, the move would have been considered perfectly normal. Iran, alongside Russia, was ranked among Armenia’s top — if difficult — allies. Today, Armenia is actively seeking to exit the Kremlin’s orbit and forge strategic ties with the United States and the European Union, while seeking to make lasting peace with its historical enemies, Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Coming amid ongoing hostilities between the United States and Iran, Pashinyan’s visit may hence seem a contradiction, all the more so perhaps as NATO leaders, including President Donald Trump, were traveling next door to Turkey for their annual summit. However, the trip, which followed another visit to Russia’s Yekaterinburg on July 6 where he met with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, highlights the precarious balancing act Pashinyan must maintain to keep his small, landlocked nation — already wracked by two bruising wars with Azerbaijan — out of further trouble.

Emboldened by its unexpected resilience in the face of US and Israeli attacks, Iran is projecting greater confidence, not least toward Armenia, with which it shares a 44-kilometer (27-mile) border. The diminutive strip is critical to Iran’s access to the Black Sea and gives the Islamic Republic leverage over its other northern neighbor and close ally of Israel, Azerbaijan.

In October 2024, Iran opened its largest permanent foreign trade center in Yerevan as part of a broader push to increase two-way trade — which stood at roughly $770 million in 2025 — to as much as $3 billion, while creating a three-way hub with India that would connect it to Europe.

The renewed assertiveness was on display as Iran’s ambassador to Yerevan, Khalil Shirgholami, told local media on Wednesday that his government’s “determination about forging a strategic partnership is serious” — a message Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian personally relayed to Pashinyan in Tehran.

“The text of this comprehensive strategic partnership is currently in the review and drafting stage. If we can finalize [its] conclusion as soon as possible, the Islamic Republic of Iran will certainly welcome Mr. Nikol Pashinyan for a visit to Tehran to sign this memorandum of understanding," Shirgholami said.

The ambassador held the presser hours after Trump said that an interim agreement with Iran was effectively dead following a new exchange of US and Iranian strikes. “To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them,” Trump told reporters in Ankara.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry had not responded to Al-Monitor's request for comment on the Iranian ambassador's statement as of the time of publication.

TRIPPing up Iran

For Iran, one of the most pressing issues in its relations with Armenia is the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP. Shirgholami said it should be a “key agenda item” in bilateral ties. The planned transport, energy and trade corridor would link Azerbaijan to its Soviet-era exclave, Nakhichevan, and Turkey through Armenia’s southern Syunik region that borders Iran. It would give Turkey direct access to Azerbaijan and Central Asia without having to go through Iran, as it currently does.

Tehran fears that the corridor's real purpose is to physically cut it off from Armenia and Georgia and provide US security contractors — who are meant to guard the route — with a launching pad of sorts in the event of further conflict.

An initial agreement for its implementation was signed in August last year at the White House between Trump, Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

Trump is widely credited with having prevented Azerbaijan from launching a third war to establish the link by force by getting Aliyev and Pashinyan to sign the TRIPP agreement alongside a separate commitment to conclude a peace agreement before September 2025. That is when Azerbaijan was expected to go on the offensive, two Western diplomats based in the region told Al-Monitor on condition they not be cited by name.

In May of this year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Yerevan for the first time to initial the TRIPP framework agreement with his Armenian counterpart, Ararat Mirzoyan. 

Unsurprisingly, the Iranian ambassador raised TRIPP during the news conference. Recalling the overnight US strikes on Iran, the envoy said, “Iran’s very legitimate and logical concern regarding the presence of Americans near its borders must receive a clear response.”

“The government of the Republic of Armenia has assured us that the implementation of this program and project will not create any challenge or threat for Iran as a result of a US presence,” the envoy added. But it remains unclear whether Armenia’s assurances  are enough to satisfy Iran now that Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps hawks are said to hold greater sway in the wake of Khamenei’s death.

“After the war, Iran feels more emboldened, which means most probably that Iran now feels it has more capacity and capabilities to complicate TRIPP, at least in its current form, or to force some changes,” Benyamin Poghosyan, a senior fellow at the APRI think tank in Yerevan, told Al-Monitor.

Other analysts concur. “The United States not having achieved any of its declared and non-declared goals vis-a-vis Iran has strengthened Tehran’s position in the region,” Tigran Grigoryan, head of the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, told Al-Monitor. “Armenian diplomacy has a huge mountain to climb. It should try to communicate with the Iranians, understand their grievances and also their red lines. They should explain that this project is not against Iran and that Iran may also be able to benefit from the opening of new lines of communications,” Grigoryan added.

This would involve guarantees that Iran can continue to access the Black Sea, including through rail links, and receive some share of the project itself. This is hard to envision since the company founded to run the scheme is 74% owned by the United States, with the remaining 26% owned by Armenia.

Caught between neighbors

The real challenge facing Armenia is not the threat of direct Iranian intervention — an unlikely scenario given how isolated Iran already is. Rather, it is the risk that Turkey does not reopen its land border with Armenia in the near future.

Turkey has linked progress in its ongoing normalization talks with Armenia to progress in Armenia’s own peace talks with Azerbaijan. Baku insists that Armenia rewrite its constitution to remove articles that it says constitute territorial claims on Nagorno-Karabakh. Pashinyan failed to secure the necessary majority in the parliament to hold a referendum on such changes.

Should the status quo persist while TRIPP advances — Pashinyan has said ground could be broken by the end of this year — Armenia could be left with a corridor that mainly serves Turkey and Azerbaijan. “Pashinyan has given management of our mineral-rich territory to the United States along with de facto control of our southern border. At the same time, he is helping to create a Turkic corridor running from the Bosporus to China,” Artur Khachatryan, a nationalist lawmaker who was reelected as part of the opposition Armenia Alliance, fumed in a recent interview with Al-Monitor. Syunik is home to one of the world’s largest molybdenum mines in the Kajaran area. The mineral is used in the production of stainless steel and other alloys.

Faced with such uncertainties, Pashinyan needs to preserve relations with Tehran and manage Russia, even as he strives to loosen the latter’s economic and military grip over Armenia, a policy that has considerable popular backing. Many Armenians blame Russia for their humiliating defeat by Azerbaijan.

Their feelings for Iran are sharply different. “Iran is our best neighbor. Iran is amazing. I want to help the Iranian people. I want to go there and fight against America,” Armen Hayrapetyan, a retired school teacher in Pashinyan’s native Tavush province, told Al-Monitor. While most of his compatriots’ sentiments are not quite as extreme, many believe Iran has helped to prevent Azerbaijani encroachments on Syunik by issuing harsh and repeated public warnings about any unilateral redrawing of the regional map. It has held several military exercises along the Armenian border to back its words.

At a May 28 military parade held in central Yerevan to mark Republic Day, truck-mounted, short-range air-defense systems identified by experts as the Iranian-made AD-08 were among several foreign wares on display. “If we buy equipment from Iran, it’s a political message,” Eduard Arakelyan, a defense expert at the Region Center for Democracy and Security, told Al-Monitor.

In late June, Iran’s vice president and head of the country’s Plan and Budget Organization, Seyed Hamid Pourmohammadi, came to Syunik to take part in the official groundbreaking ceremony for the Kajaran tunnel and tour the nearly completed 32-kilometer-long (19-mile) Agarak-Kajaran highway that will reduce travel time to Georgia.

An estimated 50,000 to 70,000 ethnic Armenians continue to reside in Iran. During his press conference on Wednesday, the Iranian ambassador said that the late supreme leader “showed particular respect for the Armenian community living in Iran and took every opportunity to visit Armenian families, especially those whose sons were killed during the Iran-Iraq war [from 1980 to 1988].”

No such sympathy was afforded by Russia when more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians were effectively expelled in 2023 by Azerbaijan from Nagorno-Karabakh. Russian peacekeepers deployed along lines of contact sat on their hands. The Kremlin’s embargo on Armenian fruits, vegetables, seafood and brandy, which observers say was intended to squeeze Pashinyan ahead of the elections, remains largely intact. The EU announced a swath of measures to cushion the blow, among them tariff-free access for Armenian fruits and other products destined for the Russian market. In practical terms, such gestures remain largely symbolic due to the long distances and lack of direct transport routes with Armenia.

Against this background, the Armenian leader understands that "he needs good relations with Iran and not irritate Russia too much,” all the while telling the Europeans that “he is pro-European and telling them ‘you should support me,’” Poghosyan said.