European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arrived in Baku on July 1. On the very same day, as von der Leyen was in Azerbaijan ahead of her subsequent visit to Yerevan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, on his own initiative, held a phone conversation with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.
The Armenian government’s readout does not specify the issues discussed by Mishustin and Pashinyan. It merely states that they addressed bilateral trade, economic, and cultural ties. Yet the timing is noteworthy: Pashinyan chose to call Mishustin on the very day von der Leyen arrived in Baku, just before her visit to Yerevan.
The sequence arguably reflects the increasingly complex and multilayered triangle linking Russia, Armenia, and the European Union. It is also significant that Pashinyan reached out to Mishustin rather than Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite having said during the election campaign that he had an agreement to meet Putin in Moscow in the second half of June. Notably, the Kremlin never denied those statements. The meeting, however, never took place, while Pashinyan ultimately spoke with Mishustin instead.
Did Putin decline to meet him? If Moscow had intended what might be described as a complete diplomatic snub, it is unlikely Mishustin would have taken the call against Putin’s wishes. A more plausible explanation is that the Russian president’s agenda is currently dominated by far more pressing priorities, leaving little time for either Pashinyan or Armenia. Over the past two to three weeks, Ukraine has sharply intensified its strikes on targets in Crimea and even around Moscow, creating serious military and political challenges for Russia. That, in turn, may signal a new stage of escalation in the war.
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Given that Ukraine’s strikes against Russia would simply have been impossible without Europe’s comprehensive financial, technological, and intelligence support, von der Leyen’s visit to Baku, and then to Yerevan, becomes even more noteworthy against that backdrop.
Von der Leyen will likely seek to build diplomatically and politically on developments that, in the author’s view, have already been advanced on the military front in Ukraine. Pashinyan, meanwhile, may have used his conversation with Mishustin to gauge the extent of Moscow’s willingness—or capacity—to respond.
Hakob BADALYAN
