After its preferred candidates lost election in Armenia earlier this year, Russia is implementing a new strategy against the trans-Caucasian economic corridor: whipping up fears of international conflict.

Having failed in their attempt to unseat Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in June, Russia’s allies in Armenia have turned their fire on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the US-developed transit corridor passing through southern Armenia at the center of last year’s peace deal with Azerbaijan. Throughout September, pro-Russian parties, Kremlin-linked analysts, and revanchist nationalists in the country have worked from a common script: brand the project as Israeli, call on Iran to stop it, and convince the Armenian public that the corridor will cost them their sovereignty

This campaign is unlikely to derail TRIPP this year. Instead, it is aimed at the constitutional referendum Armenia must hold before the peace treaty can be signed. Washington should move faster than it can mature.

Is Iran Planning to Attack the TRIPP Corridor? Iran Doesn’t Think So

The Israeli label is the newest line of attack. On September 18, former Armenian prime minister Khosrov Harutyunyan wrote in the pro-Russian newspaper Golos Armenii that TRIPP bears an “Israeli trace”—describing the corridor as a plan conceived in Israel and merely presented as American, and suggesting that talk of it began at the height of the confrontation among Iran, Israel, and the United States. Historian Armen Ayvazyan has described Azerbaijan’s government as fully dependent on the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, implying that Armenia’s would head in a similar direction if the TRIPP were left intact. The security analyst Hrachya Arzumanyan went further on Telegram, alleging that “world Jewry” had been collectively responsible for Armenia’s loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan in 2023 and vowing to remind them of it “for the next two thousand years.” The label turns a 42-kilometer road and rail line into a front in the Iran war, which makes Tehran a party to it and discredits the project with anyone hostile to Israel.

Iran is the constituency this campaign most wants to mobilize. Vigen Akopyan, the managing partner of the Russian news agency EADaily, wrote on September 22 that the US and Israel had been trying to seal Iran off from every direction, and that TRIPP would turn Armenia’s southern Syunik province into a battleground between Washington and Tehran. Tigran Torosyan, a former speaker of parliament, called the route an American base under another name, one Iran “cannot allow.” Ayvazyan likewise declared Syunik Iran’s “red line,” and Sergey Melkonyan of the Applied Policy Research Institute (APRI) in Armenia suggested Tehran could respond as it did in March, when Iranian drones struck Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave. Indeed, former Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati warned in August 2025 that the route would become a graveyard for “Trump’s mercenaries.”

Yet Iran has not made a credible threat to the TRIPP project. Its ambassador in Yerevan, Khalil Shirgholami, has distinguished TRIPP from the Azerbaijani corridor concept Iran long opposed and says Tehran has no reason to object absent a foreign security or military presence. Iran also has few resources with which to act against Armenia; it is under US naval blockade, its oil exports have all but stopped, and its airlines have been barred from Azerbaijan under new US aviation sanctions since late September. The revanchists in Yerevan are trying to draw red lines that Tehran itself does not appear committed to. 

How Russia Has Stoked Anti-TRIPP Activism

The domestic message is loss of sovereignty. Gohar Meloyan of Samvel Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia party claims 74 percent of the route’s revenue will go to America. The reality is more complicated; the framework Washington and Yerevan announced in January gives the United States a 74 percent stake in a joint development company for an initial 49 years, but the route runs under Armenian law.

This subtlety has been lost in the commentary surrounding the route. Ruben Melkonyan, dean of oriental studies at Yerevan State University, has called TRIPP a road Armenia will host but never control. Levon Zurabyan of the Armenian National Congress, the party of former President Levon Ter-Petrosyan and once the most pragmatic voice on Azerbaijan in Armenian politics, warned it would provoke a proxy war. The analyst Vahe Davtyan implausibly claimed that the corridor had set Armenia against the European Union—even as Brussels has committed €10 billion ($11.2 billion) to the same Middle Corridor TRIPP will feed. Akopyan states the conclusion outright: Armenia can survive only in alliance with Russia and in strategic dialogue with Iran.

It is impossible to miss Russia’s ties to the anti-TRIPP narrative. These voices appear regularly on Russian-owned or Russian-aligned outlets such as EADaily, Sputnik Armenia, 168.am, and Golos Armenii, and they build on a state campaign. Before the June election, independent analysts claimed that in the run-up to Armenia’s elections, the Russian-backed “Matryoshka” propaganda network had published 343 fake videos by early May. The previous year, the Storm-1516 propaganda operation targeted Armenia more than any other country in the world. Moscow has used blunt instruments of coercion as well, threatening to cancel the agreement under which it supplies Armenia’s gas; the members of the Eurasian Economic Union will also convene in December to discuss suspending Armenia’s membership. 

A second front has opened in Washington, where Armenian lobbying efforts to enforce human rights sanctions against Azerbaijan may torpedo the peace process. On September 14 and 15, the Armenian National Committee of America held more than 150 meetings on Capitol Hill, pressing lawmakers to enforce Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act and to sign a letter opposing the administration’s extension of its waiver. There is no reason to believe that this effort is coordinated with Moscow. Even so, cutting assistance to Azerbaijan and reviving a 1992 sanction would strip away the leverage that brought Baku to the table, and endanger an enduring peace agreement.

Russia Is Losing the TRIPP Battle—but It Will Have More Chances

For now, this campaign is losing. Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won 49.8 percent of the vote in June—just shy of an outright majority, but far surpassing Strong Armenia’s 23.3 percent, despite one of the largest Russian influence operations on record. Russia is tied down in Ukraine, and Iran is under blockade. On September 23, representatives of more than 40 companies came to New York to look at TRIPP, accompanied by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), and representatives from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and all five “C5” Central Asian nations. The administration has put $201 million into a Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund.

Pashinyan has held through all of it, and he will probably hold again. His voters are the softer target. Three decades of conflict left the two societies with no trust to spend, and a claim repeated into that vacuum for eighteen months could change public opinion, forcing a shift in policy.

The danger to TRIPP lies in the future timeframe. Azerbaijan will not sign the peace treaty until Armenia removes its territorial claim to Nagorno-Karabakh from its constitution. Armenian voters will need to approve that change in a referendum expected in 2027. Meanwhile, the feasibility study for the route is not due until the end of this year or early next, and the joint development company has yet to be formally launched. Every claim now in circulation, from the Israeli plot to the Iranian red line to the foreign base in Syunik, is an argument for voting no. It will carry more weight if Russia and Iran have recovered some of their strength by then.

Washington can do much to close this gap. It should formally launch the development company and name its leadership, and begin visible work and hiring in Syunik before the referendum, so that voters judge the route by jobs rather than rumors.  

Russia and Iran are weaker today than they have been in a generation, and both will recover. The United States should hope that the road is under construction—and the permanent peace treaty signed—before they do.

About the Author: Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in various outlets such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.

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