From Yerevan to Belgrade: Russia’s Geopolitical Influence Is Receding
On May 28, President Trump endorsed Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan ahead of the June 7 parliamentary election, calling him a “great friend and Leader” whose pro-Western reorientation Washington is now directly underwriting the proposed “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” corridor with Azerbaijan.
This endorsement comes days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to Yerevan last week: where he signed a strategic partnership agreement with Armenia.
It is rare for a U.S. president to back a candidate openly in a country on Russia’s regional orbit.
Unlike the NATO ally Hungary for example, Armenia still hosts a Russian military base on its territory and is a member of the Eurasian Customs Union (a trade bloc consisting of five post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia)
But, and this is crucial, in tandem with its effort to normalize relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenia is also trying to distance itself from Russia.
And in fact, as of 2024, Armenia has suspended its CSTO (Russian version of post-soviet NATO) membership.
And so this endorsement was the most visible sign of a broader pattern: Russia is losing influence across Europe and its near abroad, in real time, through ballot boxes and diplomatic pivots, and at exactly the moment when Moscow can least afford to.
This post will work through three cases of that contraction.
Armenia is being actively pulled into the American orbit, with the second-order question of how to do adjust policy towards Azerbaijan now becoming more pressing.
Hungary has defected outright through a landslide election bringing in the opposition leader Peter Magyar into power.
And Serbia, the most pro-Russia government in Europe through four years of war, is quietly hedging toward Kyiv and Brussels.
Armenia: The Active Pull
Trump’s endorsement of Pashinyan was unusual in form and direct in intent.
He described Pashinyan as a great friend and leader, praised the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement initialed at the White House in August 2025, and announced that the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity would soon break ground, transforming the South Caucasus and helping American energy companies gain access from Central Asia.
Pashinyan thanked Trump on X and posted the American and Armenian flags side by side.
Rubio had visited Yerevan two days earlier and signed both the TRIPP framework and a U.S.-Armenia strategic partnership charter.
Pashinyan faces a tight race on June 7 against Russia-backed challengers.
The election is widely viewed as a referendum on his effort to loosen Armenia’s dependence on Russia and build closer ties with the West.
The Kremlin has responded with public threats to cut off cheap gas supplies and other forms of economic pressure, alongside what Armenian and Western observers describe as widespread Russian interference in the campaign.
(side note: some of this outright blackmail from Russia is also not credible at all as a threat. For example, Russia’s gas sold to Armenia is imported by a company that is a subsidiary of Gazprom - the parent Russian company. So it is not like Russia is offering this subsidized supply out of pure friendship..)
In addition, Russian military intel agency, the GRU, has been spreading disinformation aimed at weakening Pashinyan ahead of these elections.
So in this context, the endorsement, the partnership charter, and the corridor framework are the Trump administration’s answer: a direct American commitment to underwrite the pro-Western pivot.
This is the right call.
The South Caucasus aligning with the West and away from Russia depends on the anti-Russian, pro-EU candidate remaining in power in Yerevan.
The opposition’s victory would reverse the trajectory and hand Moscow the leverage.
But the Armenia piece is only half of the South Caucasus picture.
The other half is Azerbaijan, and there the trajectory is moving in the wrong direction.
The Aliyev regime presents itself as a Western partner and architect of the peace with Armenia, but the underlying alignment with Moscow is deeper than the surface diplomacy suggests.
Leyla Aliyeva, the president’s eldest daughter, was born in Moscow, studied at MGIMO (the elite Russian foreign-ministry institute), and serves as vice-president of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation.
Investigative reporting documents that she celebrated the 30th birthday of Veronika Naryshkina, daughter of Russian SVR foreign-intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin, on a yacht owned by Russian-Azerbaijani billionaire God Nisanov.
The two women do business together.
The visible Aliyev-Putin coolness is theater.
The underlying business and personal architecture connecting the ruling families remains intact.
This matters because Azerbaijan’s pro-Western posture is contingent on a regime that has Russian intelligence ties at the highest family level, that has jailed the genuine pro-Western democratic opposition (including the currently jailed opposition Popular Front Party leader Ali Karimli), and that retains every incentive to play both sides depending on which is paying more.
As long as that regime is in power and the pro-Western democrats are in jail, the South Caucasus realignment is structurally unstable.
Putin retains the leverage to reignite the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict whenever it serves Russian purposes, because one of the two parties is still penetrated by Russian intelligence ties at the family level.
U.S. policy should therefore not stop at endorsing Pashinyan.
It should also press Aliyev to release political prisoners and permit free elections in which pro-Western democratic opposition can compete.
Without that pressure, the peace deal that the Trump administration is rightly trumpeting as a signature achievement remains vulnerable to Russian-instigated reversal.
With it, both Armenia and Azerbaijan move squarely into the U.S. orbit, leaving Georgia as the only remaining South Caucasus state under significant Russian influence, and Georgia’s turn will come.
