Beniamin Matevosyan: Did Putin warn Pashinyan three years ago?

(Overchuk reveals details of Armenian-Russian relations)

A statement by Alexey Overchuk, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, on the situation in Armenian-Russian trade relations has highlighted a deep crisis that Yerevan has been moving toward for the past several years, that we ourselves have repeatedly discussed. The figures cited by the Russian side demonstrate a rapid deterioration in mutual trade turnover. While trade between Russia and Armenia reached a record level of around $12 billion in 2024, the figure fell to $8 billion in 2025. In 2026, there was a dramatic decline, indicators dropped by approximately two-thirds compared to 2025, and the downward trend continues. Moscow emphasizes that this scenario was by no means unexpected, but was a directly predictable outcome of the course chosen by Armenia’s leadership.

As Overchuk noted, over the past three to four years, Russian officials have repeatedly communicated to their colleagues in Yerevan the risks inevitably arising from attempts to destabilize Eurasian integration. In essence, warnings about a decline in trade turnover were voiced as far back as three years ago, when Armenian authorities intensified their push toward integration into European Union structures. However, warnings that attempts to align with the anti-Russian camp would result in tangible economic consequences were ignored. Nikol Pashinyan’s team not only failed to heed the warnings, but also, over these years, failed to find any real alternatives to the Russian market, despite regular claims to the contrary.

Specific sector-level figures illustrate this failure to find a replacement for Eurasian supply chains. Numerous claims about reorienting exports toward European markets collide, in practice, with the dry statistics of the Food Safety Inspection Body of the Republic of Armenia. Over the past three months, 845,000 cut flowers and 10 tons of floral products were exported from Armenia to EU countries. Comparing these figures to 2025 data, when 96.2 million units of floral products were shipped to Russia, it becomes clear that current European deliveries amount to less than one percent of the previous volume. This kind of gap is characteristic of key export categories that have no prospects of easily breaking into the European market.
The current situation reveals a qualitative shift in Moscow’s rhetoric. Whereas for several years Russian authorities tried to conduct a cautionary dialogue exclusively with their Armenian counterparts behind closed doors, today Russia is communicating openly with the citizens of the Republic of Armenia. Moscow is directly warning Armenian society about the risks of further confrontation and integration into a bloc hostile to Russia — the EU. Thus, the framework of the discussion is shifting: the final choice of development path remains with the citizens of Armenia, as does full responsibility for the inevitable economic consequences of that choice.

Think about it…