“We have seen the country under intense and consistent pressure from Russia; a visit would send a strong signal of support, following on from the concrete support already delivered,” said one EU official working on the prospective trip, granted anonymity to speak frankly, as were the other people with knowledge of the planned trip.
They added it would send the message that “Europe is here for you.”
The trip has other repercussions for Brussels, as the College of Commissioners meeting scheduled for July 1 has been canceled, according to two of the officials. As a result, several legislative proposals that had been due for adoption have been delayed or otherwise affected. Among them are the Commission’s Public Procurement Act, a planned overhaul of EU tendering rules, as well as initiatives on the defense single market, innovation and livestock farming, as POLITICO first reported. The Commission has not yet announced a new date for these files.
Next week’s trip will be von der Leyen’s second to Armenia in less than two months. The Commission president was in Yerevan in May for the European Political Community summit, which Armenia hosted, before taking part in the inaugural EU-Armenia summit.
This year’s Armenian election was the first since Russian forces began to abandon their posts in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2022, where they had been deployed as “peacekeepers” following a war two years earlier. The region, inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders, had been controlled by its ethnic Armenian population since a conflict in the 1990s. The entire population fled in the wake of an Azerbaijani offensive to retake the territory.
Since then, Pashinyan has accelerated Armenia’s turn toward the West, suspending participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-led military alliance, and expressing interest in eventual EU membership.