When Europe’s leaders gathered in Yerevan, Armenia, in May, the sharpest words about Europe’s view of the South Caucasus came from a leader who was not in the room.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, speaking by video link from Baku, used his allotted time at the European Political Community summit to rebuke the European Parliament for a resolution it had passed days earlier and accuse it of sabotaging his country’s peace process with Armenia.
Just years ago, an Azerbaijani leader addressing a summit in the Armenian capital would have seemed unreal.
That he spent the time scolding the Europeans and not the Armenians says even more about how relations between the two former foes have changed, and how little European thinking has changed with them. That disconnect is costly in a region whose stability is central to European interests: The South Caucasus forms the only major overland route between Europe and Asia that bypasses both Russia and Iran, while offering Europe an energy corridor for Caspian and Central Asian gas.
Six years ago this week, a 44-day conflict began that returned Karabakh to Azerbaijan — internationally recognized Azerbaijani territory that had been held by Armenian forces since the wars of Soviet dissolution. At the time, Baku’s restoration of sovereignty over the region and the departure of its Armenian population were widely expected to entrench Armenian-Azerbaijani enmity for another generation.
Instead, it created the conditions for rapprochement. The two sworn enemies are now closer to a durable peace than at any point since the bloody six-year war of the late 1980s and early 1990s that drove Azerbaijanis from Karabakh and surrounding territories.
Europe, as it tends to with wars on its eastern edges, fell back on its usual tropes. Western debate following the 44-day war revolved around the rights and security of Karabakh’s Armenians and some type of special political status for the region. Those talking points never took into account what happened on the ground — the restoration of an internationally recognized country’s territorial integrity. They remained tethered to the same prewar mediation framework that had failed for decades, leaving Europe reliant on assumptions overtaken by events and weakening its credibility as an intermediary.
For Baku, the contradiction was clear: The same European capitals that insisted on Ukraine retaining its borders defined in 1991 against Russia’s all-out invasion saw Azerbaijan’s claims as open to negotiations. That credibility deficit eventually caught up with European mediation: In October 2023, talks unraveled at the European Union-led summit in Granada, Spain, amid Azerbaijani accusations that France was siding with Armenia.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan and Armenia pressed ahead through bilateral talks, agreeing on the text of a peace treaty by March 2025. Five months later, President Donald Trump and his administration brought the two leaders to the White House to initial the deal.
Territorial claims are now over. No soldier has been killed on the border in nearly three years. Azerbaijani fuel has been flowing to Armenia by rail via Georgia since December 2025, and Armenia is now preparing to send goods the other way.
Baku and Yerevan are looking to restore and reopen shared transit routes, including the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, and both countries have hinted at reestablishing passenger train lines, shut down and dismantled nearly four decades ago.
Slowly, yet by no means universally, Europeans have begun to accept that territorial integrity lies at the heart of any settlement. Europe now needs to catch up with a reality it has only belatedly begun to recognize.
Ironically, the bloc now finds itself in a position of leverage. Armenia is turning toward the EU as it loosens its dependence on Russia, and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, reelected in June, has made European integration the centerpiece of his foreign policy.
For once, Brussels could play a decisive role in taking the peace process from an initialed agreement to a signed treaty. The last obstacle lies in Yerevan, where what Europe says carries significant weight.
Armenia’s constitution invokes the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which, in turn, cites the 1989 decision to unify Soviet Armenia with Karabakh. Baku regards that as an outstanding claim to Azerbaijani territory, and therefore a red line before any peace treaty can be signed and brought into force.
Removing the reference to Karabakh requires a new constitution adopted by referendum, which Pashinyan promised to hold once the election was behind him. His party fell short of the two-thirds majority that would have let it carry the process alone, so he will need votes from elsewhere.
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Europe should not let that calculation become an excuse for waiting, and the EU should tie progress on Armenia’s European ambitions to Yerevan finally resolving its long-standing feud.
For decades, Europe’s capitals treated the region based on suppositions that are now long obsolete. Now, Armenia has reelected the leader who promised to remove the last barrier to the peace process. After years of finding itself behind events in the South Caucasus, Europe now has an opportunity to help bring that process to a close.
Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and the author of Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War and Crimea 2014-2024: Where Russia’s War Started and Where Ukraine Will Win. He is also a co-editor of Russia and Modern Fascism: New Perspectives on the Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine and a co-author of The Four Roots of Russia’s War Against Ukraine.