42Received 14.04.2025. Revised 21.05.2025. Accepted 26.06.2025.
Abstract. Since 2018, Armenia’s foreign policy under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has led to a deepening rift between Moscow and Yerevan and an almost complete breakdown in understanding between the two countries. However, given the dynamics of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, it is clear that strategic challenges do not always align with political ones. Following its defeat in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in the Fall of 2020, Armenia has found itself in an exceptionally vulnerable and unstable position. Rebuilding its defense capabilities would be difficult even without the degradation of relations with its Russian ally. Post 2022, Russia had shifted nearly all its focus to the Western direction. The Special Military Operation in Ukraine has drained Moscow of its surplus of modern weaponry, which could hypothetically have been shared with Yerevan. In search of alternatives, Armenia turned to India and France. However, without direct support or solid military guarantees from Russia, the process of restoring Armenia’s defense capabilities has run into what is known as a “security dilemma”. Azerbaijan still maintains a significant military and technical superiority over Armenia and benefits from its alliance with Turkey. This, in theory, allows Baku to impose its preferred terms for resolving contested issues on a relatively weaker adversary, long before Armenia’s newly acquired arms could correct the existing imbalance. This paper explores the crisis of Armenia’s multi-vector foreign policy and attempts to draw a distinction between foreign policy causes and military-strategic consequences.
Keywords: foreign policy, Armenia, strategy, Azerbaijan, armed forces, the Second Karabakh War of 2020
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