The upcoming parliamentary elections in Armenia are no longer being discussed only within Armenia itself. Today, the Armenian vote is being closely watched in Azerbaijan, Russia, Türkiye, across Europe, and in the United States. This is not simply another domestic electoral cycle in a small South Caucasus country. It is an event capable of influencing the future geopolitical architecture of the entire region. At the same time, its significance should neither be exaggerated nor underestimated. For the first time in Armenia’s modern political history, an incumbent leader is approaching elections with an agenda centred on peace and normalisation rather than conflict management or historical mobilisation. This distinction is important. The 2021 elections were not about peace. In the aftermath of the 2020 Karabakh war, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was effectively seeking a mandate connected to the preservation of the Karabakh issue and to a broader post-war political framework shaped by remedial secession narratives. The current political moment is fundamentally different. What is now emerging is a debate not only about political leadership, but about Armenia’s entire geopolitical worldview and strategic self-perception. (To read the full commentary, click on the image above.)

Europe has grown uncomfortably familiar with Russia’s policy towards its “near abroad”: the former Soviet states that Moscow continues to treat as part of its rightful sphere of influence. Sheltered by NATO and still invested in managing relations with Russia, Western capitals responded to the 2008 war in Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea as serious but containable shocks: the first largely through mediation and monitoring, the second through non-recognition and sanctions. That sense of distance has since collapsed. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 turned the post-Soviet space into a central theatre of European security, while Donald Trump has further unsettled confidence in the NATO umbrella itself. Few observers are better placed to make sense of this moment than Régis Genté. A French journalist based in Tbilisi for more than two decades, he has covered the South Caucasus and the wider post-Soviet world for Le Figaro, Radio France Internationale, and France 24, alongside policy work for think tanks including IFRI. In his book Notre homme à Washington: Trump dans la main des Russes, he argues that the US president's posture toward Moscow is neither erratic nor accidental, but the product of a four-decade Russian cultivation that has tied Trump to the Kremlin more tightly than Washington or Brussels yet admits. In this conversation, he traces those ties, explains how Putin keeps Russia's elites bound to the Kremlin, and reads Georgia's political crisis as a case study in Russian post-imperial influence. (To read the full interview, click on the image above.)