Days before Armenians voted on 7 June, the European Commission declared it was “standing firmly” behind prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and unveiled a support package of more than €50m.
Weeks after the vote – widely seen in Armenia as fraudulent – and after members of the main opposition bloc were arrested for petitioning to annul the results, Brussels expanded its investment commitments toward €2.5bn and advanced visa-liberalisation talks.
Among EU officials, the rationale has hardened into doctrine: “He [Pashinyan] is taking Armenia away from Russia.”
That sentence has become the whole of EU policy toward Yerevan. It is also a strategic error, one that is making Armenia less democratic and less safe at the same time without loosening Russia’s grip.
Consider what that sentence has been asked to excuse.
Four senior clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church detained and/or prosecuted, one archbishop held 344 days in pre-trial detention, and a criminal case opened against the Catholicos — the head of the Church — himself.
A businessman arrested hours after making a statement in defence of the church and held in pre-trial detention and house arrest for several months, his company then seized by act of parliament, a takeover now being contested before international arbitration in Stockholm.
Opposition offices and media raided in the election campaign’s final fortnight. Six registered candidates arrested the day before the vote and several others were arrested after contesting the election in the Constitutional Court.
A ruling-party ally petitioning the electoral commission — 36 hours before polls opened, on the prime minister’s own televised demand — to strip the largest opposition party of its right to compete.
Unbudgeted spending, including a surprise pension increase, showered on voters in the run-up. And at 2am on the morning after the polls closed, with barely a tenth of ballots processed, a victory declared before the capital had reported.
Western observers documented much of this themselves.
Pressure to attend party events
ODIHR’s own preliminary statement records pressure on public-sector employees to attend ruling-party events and pre-election handouts that, in the observers’ words, “undermined the equality of opportunity to campaign, at odds with OSCE commitments”; a public broadcaster displaying “clear bias in favour of the ruling party, contrary to its legal obligations and public mandate”; intimidation and prosecutions that left many opposition supporters “refraining from actively engaging in the campaign”; and observers denied access to the entry of results in 11 of 38 district commissions.
Then came the headline: a “genuine choice” in a “well-run process.”
The observers documented the disease and pronounced the patient healthy — with the domestic findings buried beneath the one item that fit the story the West had already chosen to tell: foreign pressure.
The EU's embrace does not merely coexist with this record; it underwrites it. Autocrats respond to price signals.
When each escalation — an archbishop jailed, a company expropriated, candidates arrested on election eve — is answered from Brussels with a package, a summit, or progress on visas, the price of repression is set at zero, and the lesson is learned.
Leaders learnt from Georgia
Compare Georgia: there, democratic backsliding froze the country’s European path and put its officials under sanctions.
Armenia’s rulers watched and drew the obvious conclusion — the EU’s principles are negotiable wherever its geography is convenient. Nothing corrodes European soft power faster than the discovery that its values are a function of its interests.
Azerbaijan — an outright autocracy courted by EU for its hydrocarbons — is Exhibit A.
The deeper cost is strategic. Armenia lives next to an Azerbaijan that took Nagorno-Karabakh by force, committed ethnic cleansing there, and keeps pressing new demands.
Deterrence begins at home: it rests on trusted institutions and a society willing to sacrifice for its state. A government that jails archbishops and manufactures majorities cannot summon unity in a crisis; a leader dependent on external patronage and unpopular at home cannot ask his people for sacrifice.
By propping up one man who appeases the enemy and destroys institutions, including the church, military, and courts, the EU is producing exactly the brittle state that invites predation.
If Azerbaijan attacks again, Brussels will find its investment bought neither leverage in Baku nor strength in Yerevan.
Even the premise fails on its own terms.
You do not escape Russia by replicating its political model: the personalised power, the captured courts, the criminalised opposition are precisely the features that make states reclaimable by Moscow.
Nor is the premise’s protagonist who Brussels imagines him to be: Pashinyan’s own Russian entanglements are extensively documented, from meetings with the head of Russia’s foreign-intelligence service in the years before his “Velvet Revolution” to a campaign program that vowed to permit no “problems” with Moscow, while branding critics “foreign agents,” the Kremlin’s own vocabulary.
The former Soviet Republics that actually left Russia’s orbit for good — Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia — did so through institutions: independent courts, free media, and, above all, the peaceful alternation of power.
Not one of them was anchored to the West through a single indispensable leader. Personalised geopolitics is the Kremlin’s game. Europe wins when it plays its own.
None of this requires the EU to abandon Armenia.
It requires the EU to be consistent. Name the political prisoners in public statements, as it does elsewhere, and ask for their release or prompt, fair trials. Condition further disbursements on rule-of-law benchmarks and meaningful reform triggers.
Make full implementation of election observers’ recommendations a precondition for completing visa liberalisation.
And redirect support from the incumbent to the institutions Armenians will still need when he is gone: courts, independent media, and civic watchdogs.
A million Armenians in 1988
In February 1988, up to a million Armenians filled Yerevan’s Opera Square in the first mass democratic mobilisation of the Soviet endgame, before the Baltic Way and before the Berlin Wall came down.
Armenians did not borrow their democratic aspirations from Europe; they helped write that chapter of Europe’s own story.
The EU faces a choice: it can stand with that Armenia — the people who built the state — or with the man unbuilding it. Strengthen the institutions, not the strongman who just lost the vote of the majority of his people.
A Europe consistent in what it preaches would be Armenia’s best ally against its autocrats and its adversaries alike.
