There is a restaurant in Tsaghkadzor, a ski resort town an hour
north of Yerevan, called Dahook. The restaurant specializes in
Armenian food served in a lively setting, and in the last few
months, many Europeans in their thirties and forties, all dressed
in casual wear and not interested in talking about their office
work, have been visiting the place. As Hraparak, a newspaper based
out of Yerevan that knows how to embarrass institutions, reports,
these individuals are members of the European Union Monitoring
Mission to Armenia, and having been paid from a budget of €44
million, they spend most of their time in the saunas, restaurants,
and other places in Martuni instead of the six Forward Operating
Bases on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
There has been no such dereliction, according to the EU. The
mission, launched in February 2023 and extended through 2027 with
209 international personnel, has recorded a genuine deterrent
effect: border incidents with Azerbaijan decreased significantly
after its deployment. That is a real achievement, and one worth
noting before the criticisms. But coming right after the EU
ambassadors in Brussels gave their approval, on April 15th, for a
second parallel civilian mission to Armenia, the timing of the
article in the Armenian newspaper seems to bring up a good point
that Brussels still hasn’t answered yet.
What Brussels is actually sending?
The fresh mission, known as the European Union Partnership
Mission to Armenia (EUPM Armenia), differs both in its mandate and
nature from the EUMA mission. While the EUMA mission watches out
for threats in the border region through binoculars, the EUPM
Armenia mission will work within the ministries of Yerevan and its
security forces, providing advice on hybrid threats, cybersecurity,
information warfare abroad, and illegal finance flows. It would
have around 20-30 officers deployed for two years. Final
endorsement is expected at next week’s EU foreign ministers’
meeting, where the European Union’s foreign policy head, Kaja
Kallas, put her case forward.
What a great timing!.. June 7th marks Armenia’s first scheduled
parliamentary elections since 2018, which is one of the most
geopolitically significant elections in decades. Civil Contract,
headed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, is pitted against not
just one, but two, opposition blocs with evident links to Russia –
the Strong Armenia Party of Russian-Armenian businessman Samvel
Karapetyan, and Armenia Alliance, led by former president Robert
Kocharyan and board member of the Russian investment company RCI
Holding. As reported by the Russian paper Vedomosti, Sergei
Kiriyenko, the Presidential official in charge of
overseeing elections in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and
Moldova, has been assigned by Moscow to
oversee Russian involvement in the upcoming
elections in Armenia. The EU internal justification memo for its
mission to Armenia makes no bones about the task: “the assistance
should be aimed clearly at reducing and mitigating Russia’s
destabilising activities.”
But this actually is not the first time…
Brussels portrays the EUPM mission to Armenia as an example of
the Moldova scenario. In 2024, the EU sent about 20 experts to
Chișinău prior to parliamentary elections, working to identify
disinformation and ensure the financial transparency of campaigns.
This mission is generally seen, within EU circles, as helping
Moldova’s pro-European political majority maintain its majority. As
Kallas put it, “Armenia has asked for similar assistance against
the malign influence, just like we provided to Moldova.” The
comparison is quite real and the precedent positive, although it
should be mentioned that, unlike Armenia, Moldova does not have any
borders with Iran, nor is it currently implementing a peace
agreement with a neighbouring state that opposes the involvement of
a third country in the area.
The last issue, in turn, is the most sensitive one. The
Washington Declaration, signed by Armenia and Azerbaijan in August
2025 and brokered under American patronage, includes provisions on
the absence of third-party forces in the bilateral border area.
Azerbaijan takes this provision quite liberally, while Armenia
narrows it down to the deployment of military forces in question.
EUPM Armenia, despite working within the territory of Yerevan
instead of the border zone, may still remain unaffected by this
clause, but it would certainly operate in the same politically
charged environment and provoke the same resentment from
Azerbaijan, which has dubbed EUMA “an anti-Azerbaijan propaganda
tool.”
Which brings the story back to the restaurants and the saunas of
Yerevan. The Hraparak analysis needs to be treated with some
skepticism because the publication has political leanings and
oppositional publications in Armenia have strong motives to
discredit EU-linked organizations. The EU refutes this claim
outright. Nevertheless, the basic premise here, namely, that
missions established in low-intensity conflicts often lose focus on
their goals, that international personnel without any enforcement
mandate become disillusioned, and thus their mere existence becomes
symbolic as opposed to practical, is hardly an extreme position.
This is indeed the main criticism of Common Security and Defence
Policy (CSDP) civilian missions found in academic critique, which
holds true for Georgia, Palestine, Kosovo, and other places. The
mission’s failure to establish an enforcement mechanism “puts its
entire credibility at risk, especially when expectations outrun its
actual capacity to act.”
The EUPM Armenia, to its credit, is a different type of
deployment, advisory, embedded in institutions, focused on cyber
and information infrastructure rather than border observation.
Perhaps, this kind of work cannot be done from dining tables but
requires serious technical engagement with Armenian interlocutors
in office settings and data centers. Whether the EU bureaucracy
will manage to assemble a 20-30 man team of such experts,
especially under the pressure of the Iran conflict, is a reasonable
operational issue which, to my knowledge, was never discussed by
the ambassadors who authorized the mission.
Regarding this issue, the risks include internal political
developments in Armenia, economic pressure from foreign entities,
information manipulation, and the possibility of conflict with
Iran. Armenia’s border with Iran holds strategic importance for its
communication lines and the “North-South” transport and trade
corridor. Potentially, tension might increase Russia’s influence
over Armenia’s economy and energy sector, especially during
elections. It also highlights risks like migration, organized
crime, and illegal activities.
So what is actually at stake?
The geopolitics of the Armenian vote in June are far too serious
to be managed by an EU civilian mission alone. An electoral win by
the pro-Russian opposition bloc(s) would likely mean the end of the
trend, not just the peace negotiations with Azerbaijan, but also
the visa facilitation talks with the EU and even the opening toward
Türkiye. This would make Armenia another Georgian neighbor of the
West that finds itself on the wrong side of a major divide in the
region. Hopefully, the EU understands this perfectly. It has
committed €200 million ahead of the elections, with Kallas coming
along herself.
If done right, with experts who can distinguish between a fake
media website and an opposition media outlet, and who recognize
that dismissing all domestic criticism as “hybrid warfare” is
itself a means of undermining democracy, it might serve as a small
but valuable addition. If done wrong, it will become a metaphor for
the European Union’s habit of using its institutional footprint as
a stand-in for real policy substance, for the proliferation of
mission mandates, budgets, and personnel in hotel and restaurant
settings without ever doing the substantive work. Armenia needs the
former. Whether it receives it will depend on decisions yet to be
taken.