The region's only formal alliance, and the relationship that decided the military balance the rest of the module is arranged around.
DefenceTrainingEquipment transferDiplomatic
Open the full relationship record →Conflict coverage · South Caucasus · Relationships
Relationships
The standing arrangements between the actors in this module, each as a record with its own dates, sources and confidence: what the arrangement covers, when it began, what last changed it, and what remains unclear. Vigil publishes no measure of how strong or how hostile a relationship is — the description and its evidence are the record.
Everything in this module13 analytical layers in this conflict
Understand
Military & security
Effects & resilience
Follow
The same instrument South Ossetia signed, held by an entity that has spent the years since refusing what came after it.
DefenceBasing
Open the full relationship record →The one part of the Russian relationship Armenia has not proposed changing — and the reason its realignment is not a departure.
DefenceBasing
Open the full relationship record →A permanent declared presence, agreed in the fortnight after recognition, and the reason the 2008 settlement has never needed revisiting.
DefenceBasing
Open the full relationship record →Severed in 2008 and never restored — while the trade and the transit that the severance was supposed to interrupt went on growing.
Diplomatic
Open the full relationship record →Existential dependence, and a politics that has repeatedly refused what the dependence is offered in exchange for.
FinanceTradeEnergyInfrastructure
Open the full relationship record →Armenia's road to Russia and to the sea runs through a country having its own argument about which way it faces.
TradeInfrastructureEnergy
Open the full relationship record →One of two open borders, and the one whose value rises every time the corridor question is reopened.
TradeEnergyInfrastructure
Open the full relationship record →A dependency that stopped being only economic — and by 2026 was being written into law as a single space.
FinanceTradeEnergyInfrastructureInstitutional
Open the full relationship record →Gas the Union buys and would rather not discuss, from a supplier whose leverage grew the moment Europe stopped buying Russian.
EnergyTradeDiplomatic
Open the full relationship record →The quietest important relationship in the region: no dispute, no ideology, and every westbound pipeline in the Caucasus running through it.
EnergyTradeInfrastructureDiplomatic
Open the full relationship record →A candidacy nobody has withdrawn, attached to a process that has stopped — and a constitution that still requires pursuing it.
InstitutionalDiplomaticLegal and treaty
Open the full relationship record →A membership nobody has ended, frozen by a member who says he would be glad to be expelled from it.
DefenceInstitutionalLegal and treaty
Open the full relationship record →An unarmed civilian mission on the border, and no guarantee behind it — which is precisely the point of it.
Border securityDiplomatic
Open the full relationship record →A dispute that changed subject rather than ending — from the status of Karabakh to the line of a border that has barely been drawn.
DiplomaticLegal and treaty
Open the full relationship record →Descriptive records, not ratings. There is no field anywhere in this layer for relationship strength, warmth, hostility or direction of travel, and none may be added. Change is carried by the validity period, the recorded last material change and the linked events — each of which a reader can check. See the methodology.