Armenia is readying for a wave of US-led investment that could exceed $13 billion, almost half the country’s annual economic output, and weaken its longstanding dependence on Russia,
Bloomberg reports.
US Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Armenia this week, where he signed a civil nuclear partnership worth as much as $9 billion, signaled a potentially dramatic deepening of Washington’s ties with the tiny former Soviet republic. A separate $4 billion expansion of an artificial intelligence project may also help transform prospects for Armenia’s $27 billion economy.
“The numbers themselves are quite significant,” said Dmitry Dolgin, ING Bank’s chief CIS economist. “If these initiatives gain credibility and provide a sense of longer-term stability, that could increase Armenia’s attractiveness for portfolio flows, direct investment and even remittances.”
The deals with Armenia and Vance’s visit to neighboring Azerbaijan the next day underscored an intensifying geopolitical contest for influence in the Caucasus region, a vital trade and energy corridor linking China to Europe via central Asia that has been firmly in Moscow’s backyard for decades.
They came after US President Donald Trump hosted Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev at the White House in August to sign a preliminary peace deal ending decades of conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. That accord includes a plan to open the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a transport corridor linking Azerbaijan to its Naxcivan exclave across Armenia.
Turkey, which has a defense pact with Azerbaijan, is moving to open its border with Armenia that’s been closed since 1993 and establish diplomatic relations for the first time since the Soviet Union’s collapse. The European Union is also bolstering ties with Armenia, which has announced plans to seek eventual EU membership even as it’s currently part of a Russian-led customs bloc.
