Beniamin Matevosyan: Pashinyan is financing Azerbaijan’s budget at your expense – stating the facts

(The goals and objectives of Baku and Yerevan contradict one another)

Part of Armenia’s expert community and diplomatic circles have long taken their cue from forecasts coming out of Ankara, where, back in 2025, Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s Foreign Minister, stated that a peace agreement between Yerevan and Baku was likely to be signed in the first half of 2026. However, autumn is already on the horizon, and a full-fledged treaty remains an unfulfilled intention. Instead of the long-awaited stabilization, the region is witnessing only an escalation of demands from Azerbaijan. Following the elections, Baku’s leadership is not only stressing the need to amend Armenia’s Constitution and pushing the issue of closing the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant, but is also actively reviving the topic of the so-called “Zangezur corridor,” which Azerbaijan’s leadership, represented by Ilham Aliyev, once again openly raised last week.

The strategic goals of the two sides in the current negotiation process diverge sharply. Judging by the dynamics of events, Ilham Aliyev is seeking to secure maximum infrastructure and logistics preferences in the form of control over communication routes across Armenian territory, while at the same time dragging out the process of signing the final document for as long as possible. For Baku, this scenario looks like the most advantageous one: the absence of a signed peace treaty means it isn’t bound by any international obligations to respect its neighbors’ borders and sovereignty, allowing it to retain leverage for constant pressure. At the same time, the Azerbaijani side has found a way to extract direct financial benefit from the region’s resulting economic dependency.

Against this backdrop, the latest bilateral trade statistics released by Azerbaijani media look extremely troubling. Over the first 7 months of 2026, the volume of goods imported from Azerbaijan into Armenia exceeded $17,372,000. At the same time, mutual trade turnover shows a colossal imbalance and is, in effect, one-sided.

The flow of exports from Armenia remains strictly limited: over the entire period in question, only a single instance of Armenian goods being brought into Azerbaijan was recorded, in March of this year, for a symbolic sum of $960.

Despite assurances from Armenia’s leadership and statements by Nikol Pashinyan about the imminent start of full-fledged exports of Armenian goods to Azerbaijan, reality paints a very different picture. Money from Armenian taxpayers and consumers is going toward purchasing Azerbaijani goods, filling the revenue side of the neighboring state’s budget, while Armenian producers remain without access to the Azerbaijani market.
This situation looks especially critical against the backdrop of Armenia’s continuously growing external debt. Public debt is not an abstract figure, it is a financial burden that ultimately falls on the shoulders of every citizen of the country. The result is a vicious circle: through the growing debt (according to the latest published data from Armenia’s Statistical Committee, as of the end of June 2026, the country’s official aggregate public debt figures stand at the dollar equivalent of $13.9 billion) and the population’s own funds, the public is financing Azerbaijan’s budget, while Baku secures concessions on key national security issues, all while avoiding signing a legally binding peace agreement.

Think about that…