In the end, Armenians went with the heart. Early on Monday morning, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared victory in his country’s elections while wearing a hat and shirt depicting two hands forming a heart, his and his party’s unofficial symbol.
Throughout the campaign, Pashinyan reaffirmed his support for continuing peace negotiations with Azerbaijan and normalization with Turkey, as well as his goal of further strengthening ties with the United States and the European Union. Not feeling the love, however, is Russian President Vladimir Putin, as the results are widely seen as a rebuke to the Kremlin for its attempts to intensify its influence over the South Caucasus region. Below, Atlantic Council experts answer four pressing questions about Armenia’s election and what to expect next in the region and beyond.
1. What kind of political mandate does Pashinyan have?
Pashinyan has a clear mandate to govern, but not a decisive one. His Civil Contract party took just under 50 percent of the vote, more than double its nearest rival, and it is assured a governing majority in the National Assembly. Running against a fragmented opposition with no credible alternative to his Western pivot, this is an endorsement of his course: distancing Armenia from Russia, deepening ties with Europe, and pursuing peace with Azerbaijan and normalization with Turkey.
The biggest qualifier on his victory is the threshold he missed. The peace process has, thus far, assumed Armenia’s constitution must change, removing preamble language that Azerbaijan reads as a territorial claim on Nagorno-Karabakh. That requires a national referendum, but the National Assembly must first vote by a two-thirds majority simply to put the question to voters, and Pashinyan has fallen well short of that two-thirds majority. He cannot, by these means, start the process of changing the constitution, let alone finish it. And a referendum put to Armenians on this question would likely fail.
Peace, on the terms currently on the table, runs into an obstacle the election did not remove. None of this is an argument against the peace process, and the obstacle is not insurmountable. But it is a reminder that the path to peace can be difficult, and difficulties should not halt the process in its tracks. Pashinyan, and all others party to the peace, will need to keep working, proactively, to find a way forward, constitutional change or not.
—Laura Linderman is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and is the director of programs for the Central Asia Caucasus Institute.
2. What role did the Kremlin play in the election?
Unnerved by Armenia’s play for peace with Azerbaijan and its foreign policy pivot to the West, Russia has not-so-secretly been trying to undermine the Pashinyan government and his reelection bid. After Russia failed to back its nominal ally Armenia in its 2020 and 2023 conflicts with Azerbaijan, Pashinyan froze his country’s membership in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Since then, Moscow has sought to undermine Pashinyan, spreading false narratives online, threatening to hold up gas supplies, blocking Armenian agricultural exports, and reportedly deploying agents to distribute bribes to voters.
Russia wants Armenia to be weak and in conflict with its neighbors to maximize Moscow’s leverage over Yerevan and advance Russia’s own interests in the South Caucasus. Pashinyan has dared to break that paradigm—putting Armenia first—an exercise in sovereignty to which Moscow has not yet grown accustomed.
—Andrew D’Anieri is associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
Ahead of the June 7 Armenian parliamentary elections, Russia conducted one of the most intensive election interference campaigns in the region in recent years, deploying a wide range of tactics to shape the electoral outcome.
At the core of the interference were large-scale coordinated disinformation campaigns. Between April 2025 and April 2026, Armenia was targeted by Russian threat actor Storm-1516, linked to Russian military intelligence, more frequently than any other country in the world. Operation Matrioshka produced more fake videos targeting Armenia ahead of the election than it did ahead of Moldova’s 2025 elections, which had been one of the most heavily targeted elections previously by Kremlin. Russia-originated fabricated stories, including smear campaigns against Pashinyan and his government, were amplified and disseminated through multiple fake websites, Telegram channels, and social media accounts.
Beyond disinformation campaigns, Russia applied pressure ahead of elections across multiple fronts. According to leaked Russian documents, the Kremlin provided financial backing for pro-Russian opposition parties. Kremlin-affiliated organizationsoffered to buy flight tickets for Armenians living in Russia to travel to Armenia to vote. Pro-Kremlin actors also tried to instrumentalize the Armenian Apostolic Church to mobilize the Armenian public against the government. In an attempt to increase diplomatic pressure, Moscow also recalled its ambassador to Armenia for “consultations.” One day earlier, the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union called on Armenia to hold a referendum on joining the European Union or remaining in the Eurasian Economic Union. Russia also restricted imports of Armenian products to put economic pressure on voters.
None of it worked to sway the elections. The ruling Civil Contract party won nearly half of the vote and secured a majority in parliament, which was not the outcome Moscow preferred.
That said, calling this an absolute Russian defeat would be too simplistic an approach. The Russia-backed Strong Armenia Alliance received over 23 percent of the votes, which still gives Moscow a strong foothold in Armenian politics. In a matter of a few months, a recently formed party founded by Kremlin-backed candidate Samvel Karapetyan managed to outpace long-established opposition leaders and parties. Russia now relies on a fresh political power in Armenia, around which will seek to build a long-term strategy. The Kremlin plays a longer game than just one election cycle.
—Givi Gigitashvili is a Research Associate for the Caucasus at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab based in Georgia.
3. What does this mean for Armenia’s relations with Azerbaijan?
The victory of Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party in Armenia’s parliamentary election marks a profound shift in the strategic orientation of the Armenian electorate.
For centuries, Armenians looked to Russia as a protector against threats from Turkic peoples—more recently, fears of Azerbaijan and Turkey. Pashinyan ran explicitly on reducing that dependence on Russia, committing instead to deeper partnerships with the European Union, the United States, normalized relations with Turkey, and peace with Azerbaijan.
The Kremlin worked actively to undermine him. Russia launched a disinformation campaign, spreading false claims about Pashinyan’s health and intentions. In the campaign’s final days, Moscow even banned imports of some Armenian agricultural products, citing sudden health safety concerns. None of it worked.
Pashinyan won 49.9 percent of the vote, translating into 61 of 105 parliamentary seats—a majority, though below Civil Contract’s previous 71 seats. The result far outpaced pre-election polling, including an International Republican Institute survey that projected only 32 percent support.
The outcome reflects a clear Armenian desire for lasting peace with Azerbaijan. However, Pashinyan’s 58 percent parliamentary majority falls short of the two-thirds supermajority required to amend Armenia’s constitution to eliminate potential ambiguity regarding Armenia’s renunciation of claims on Azerbaijani territory. Azerbaijan has demanded such an amendment as a precondition for finalizing the two countries’ peace treaty. The text of that treaty was agreed to in March 2025 and initialed by both foreign ministers in August in President Donald Trump’s presence at the White House.
A constitutional amendment would also require approval in a national referendum, another potentially serious political challenge.
Azerbaijan’s leadership is nonetheless relieved. With Armenian voters having endorsed the peace process, Baku may even reconsider its constitutional precondition. And even without a formal treaty, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has stated repeatedly in recent months that Armenia and Azerbaijan are already living in peace.
—Matthew Bryza is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Turkey Program, managing director for Straife, and a former US ambassador to Azerbaijan. He was the US mediator of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between 2006 and 2009, and he covered the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict on the National Security Council staff at the White House between 2001 and 2005.
4. What does this mean for Armenia’s relations with the United States?
Pashinyan’s success is both political and geopolitical, and it includes a notable warming of relations with Washington that began late in the Biden administration and quickened when Trump returned to the Oval Office.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio underscored this in congratulating Pashinyan’s election win, noting that “the United States stands with Prime Minister Pashinyan and Armenia in the pursuit of peace, and we are committed to advancing the goals of the historic Washington Peace Summit, including implementation of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).”
Pashinyan’s success consists of freeing Armenia from its over-thirty-year confrontation with Azerbaijan. With the mediation of the United States, Pashinyan was willing to back away from Armenia’s claim to Nagorno-Karabakh, a former Armenian ethnic enclave internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan—an act that has opened the door to peace. Trump’s intervention last August, when he invited Pashinyan and Aliyev to the White House, sealed an agreement that had been tantalizingly close for several years. This development also provided an impetus for the longstanding talks on normalizing Armenian-Turkish relations—a major goal of Yerevan’s foreign policy. Proof of progress came just before the parliamentary elections when a group of Armenians entered the Turkish region of Kars by bus, the first time that border had opened to Armenia in thirty years.
All of this works well for US interests in the South Caucasus and extending into Central Asia. Trump’s promotion of peace in the South Caucasus has enhanced US influence there, including with Turkey. It also includes the prospect of a new transportation corridor into and out of landlocked Central Asia. Trump’s efforts have also effectively ended Kremlin hegemony in the area. Moscow has used the tension over Nagorno-Karabakh as a way to keep Armenia under its sway and to court Azerbaijan. No more. The US role in the South Caucasus and Central Asia is growing, and those who believe Trump is in the tank for Putin have trouble interpreting his creative diplomacy in this large region. No wonder Rubio hailed Pashinyan’s election win.
—John E. Herbst is senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former US ambassador to Ukraine.