🇦🇲 Armenia

The kingdom of Urartu was founded in 860 BC, successor to the Nairi confederation, and established sovereignty over the Armenian Highlands. It is counted as the first Armenian state and a principal participant in the ethnogenesis of the Armenians.

A large cuneiform lapidary inscription found in Yerevan records the city's foundation by the Urartian king Argishti I. Yerevan is one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities and remains the national capital.

By at least 600 BC an archaic form of Proto-Armenian had spread across the Armenian highlands. The language became the enduring core of Armenian identity, distinguishing the population from neighbouring peoples through successive imperial occupations.

With the collapse of Urartu at the beginning of the 6th century BC, the highlands came under the Medes and then the Achaemenid Empire, organised as two satrapies, XIII and XVIII. Armenia thereby became a province of a wider Persian imperial system rather than an independent power.

During the late 6th century BC the Orontids ruled a distinct geographical and political entity that neighbouring populations named Armenia. The exonym is attested in the Old Persian Behistun Inscription of 515 BC as Armina.

In 190 BC Artaxias I broke free of the Seleucid sphere of influence and founded the Artaxiad dynasty. The move inaugurated a period of genuine Armenian statehood that culminated within a century in regional dominance.

Between 95 and 66 BC Tigranes the Great expanded the Kingdom of Armenia to its greatest territorial extent. It became the strongest state of its time east of the Roman Republic, a high-water mark still central to Armenian national memory.

Armenia adopted Christianity as its state religion in the early 4th century, traditionally in AD 301, a distinction in which the nation takes great pride. Despite periods of autonomy, over the centuries it came under the sway of various empires including the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Persian and Ottoman.

Under the influence of Gregory the Illuminator, King Tiridates III made Christianity Armenia's official religion in 301, partly in defiance of the Sasanian Empire. Armenia thus became the first state in history to adopt Christianity officially, predating the Roman Empire's conversion by decades and displacing a predominantly Zoroastrian religious order. The Armenian Apostolic Church remains central to national identity, permanently defining the country's position between Muslim and Christian empires.

Around 405 the cleric Mesrop Mashtots devised a distinct script for the Armenian language. The alphabet became a cornerstone of Armenian identity, enabling a native literary and ecclesiastical tradition that survived centuries of foreign rule.

The Armenian Arsacid line ended in 428 and most of the country was absorbed into Sasanian Persia as a marzpanate. Native monarchy gave way to Persian provincial administration, leaving the Church as the chief national institution.

In 451 Armenian Christians confronted Sasanian forces at Avarayr in defence of their faith. Although militarily inconclusive, the resistance secured the continuation of Christianity in Armenia.

The Treaty of Nvarsak in 484 granted Armenia autonomy within the Sasanian order and confirmed the right to Christian worship. It settled the conflict opened at Avarayr and preserved a distinct Armenian polity.

After the Rashidun Caliphate conquered the Sasanian Empire in the mid 7th century, Armenian lands were reunited and organised as Arminiya, an autonomous principality under the Umayyads centred on Dvin. Its Prince of Armenia was recognised by both the Caliph and the Byzantine Emperor, giving Armenians a durable self-governing framework.

In 884 Ashot I secured independence from the weakened Abbasid Caliphate, ending the Arminiya principality. The reemergent Bagratuni kingdom, with satellite kingdoms in Vaspurakan, Syunik and Artsakh, lasted until 1045.

In 1045 Byzantium annexed the Bagratid kingdom, and the other Armenian states soon fell under Byzantine control. The loss of native statehood in the highlands proved lasting and preceded the Seljuk conquest by a generation.

The Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071 ended short-lived Byzantine rule over Armenia. The conquest drove Armenian princes such as Ruben westwards into Cilicia, seeding a new centre of Armenian statehood.

In the early 12th century the Zakarid family expelled the Seljuk Turks and set up a semi-independent principality in northern and eastern Armenia under Georgian patronage. The Orbelian dynasty and the House of Hasan-Jalalyan held parallel authority in Syunik, Vayots Dzor and Artsakh.

On 6 January 1198 Leo I, a descendant of Prince Ruben, was crowned king of Armenian Cilicia on the Mediterranean coast. The kingdom allied with the European Crusaders, saw itself as a bastion of eastern Christendom, and received the seat of the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Mongol armies overran Armenia during the 1230s, ending Zakarid semi-independence. Successive invasions by the Kara Koyunlu, Timurids and Aq Qoyunlu from the 13th to 15th century compounded the destruction and left the country greatly weakened.

From the early 16th century both Western and Eastern Armenia fell to the Safavids before being partitioned with the Ottomans, a division confirmed by the Peace of Amasya and decisively by the 17th-century Treaty of Zuhab. Eastern Armenia was ruled by successive Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar dynasties while Western Armenia remained Ottoman, and the borderlands were repeatedly fought over in the Ottoman–Persian Wars.

From 1604 Abbas I devastated the region to shield his north-western frontier from Ottoman invasion, deporting masses of Armenians from their homelands. The depopulation permanently altered the demography of the Armenian highlands and created large diaspora communities in Iran.

The Benedictine congregation of the Armenian Catholic Church was founded in 1712. It became a significant institution of Armenian scholarship and cultural preservation in the diaspora.

During the Russo-Persian War of 1722–23 Peter the Great allied with the Armenian meliks of Syunik and Artsakh, the first Russian foray into the region. Despite the campaign's setbacks, it emboldened Armenian resistance to Safavid and Ottoman rule and set the pattern of looking to Russia for protection.

After the Russo-Persian Wars of 1804–13 and 1826–28, the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828) transferred the Karabakh, Erivan and Nakhichevan Khanates to Russia. Eastern Armenia thereby entered the Russian imperial orbit, the political foundation of the later Armenian republic.

The eastern area of Armenia passed from Persian and Ottoman control to Russia in 1828 under the Treaty of Turkmenchay, setting the region on a separate path from western Armenia.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 extended Russian Armenia to include the regions of Kars and Ardahan. Most of Western Armenia nonetheless remained under Ottoman rule, entrenching the partition of the Armenian homeland.

During the 1890s the Dashnaktsutyun organised reform advocacy and armed fedayi groups to defend Armenian villages from massacre. It pursued a free, independent and unified Armenia and later dominated the government of the First Republic.

In response to the 1894 Sasun rebellion, Abdul Hamid II organised state-sponsored massacres that killed close to 200,000 Armenians. The atrocities earned him international infamy as the "Red Sultan" and marked the collapse of Armenian security within the Ottoman millet system.

In April 1909, shortly after the Young Turk Revolution had overthrown Sultan Hamid's government, 20,000 to 30,000 Armenians were killed in the Adana Vilayet. The killings destroyed Armenian hopes that the Committee of Union and Progress would end their second-class status.

The 1914 reform package proposed appointing an inspector general over Armenian issues as a solution to the empire's Armenian question. It was overtaken within months by the outbreak of the First World War.

Armenian intellectuals were arrested on 24 April 1915 and the Tehcir Law of 29 May 1915 initiated mass deportation; able-bodied men were massacred or worked to death while women, children and the elderly died on death marches to the Syrian desert. Estimates of the dead range from 600,000 in the first year to between one and 1.5 million overall. Turkey denies the genocide to this day, and its recognition remains a central plank of Armenian and diaspora diplomacy, commemorated annually on 24 April.

After the October Revolution of 1917 cost Armenian forces their wartime gains in Western Armenia, the three Transcaucasian territories bonded together in February 1918. The federation collapsed in May 1918 when all three parties chose to dissolve it, forcing each into separate statehood.

On 28 May 1918 the Armenian National Council declared the independence of Eastern Armenia under the leadership of Aram Manukian, following the collapse of the Russian Empire and the short-lived Transcaucasian federation. The Dashnak-dominated First Republic faced war, territorial disputes, Bolshevik rebellions and a mass influx of destitute refugees from Western Armenia, and survived barely two years before Sovietisation in 1920.

In the early 1920s Soviet authorities placed the primarily Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh within Soviet Azerbaijan, a decision at the root of the later conflict.

Turkish forces captured the territories Russia had annexed in 1878 and occupied Alexandropol, forcing the treaty of 2 December 1920. Armenia had to disarm most of its military and surrender all former Ottoman territory granted under Sèvres.

Signed on 10 August 1920, the treaty guaranteed the Armenian republic's existence and attached former Western Armenian territories to it, with borders to be drawn by President Woodrow Wilson. It was rejected by the Turkish National Movement and never came into force, leaving Armenian territorial claims unrealised.

On 5 August 1920 the Armenian National Union, the de facto Armenian administration in Cilicia, proclaimed an autonomous Armenian republic under French protection. The declaration collapsed with the wider failure of the Sèvres settlement.

Sergo Ordzhonikidze's forces entered Armenia at Karavansarai on 29 November 1920 and reached Yerevan by early December. The First Republic collapsed and Armenia was Sovietised.

War communism provoked a revolt in February 1921, after which Armenian forces under Nzhdeh established the Republic of Mountainous Armenia and fought on in Zangezur. Soviet authorities ended the rebellion by pledging to include Syunik within Armenia's borders, and the leaders crossed into Iran on 15 July 1921.

Following Sovietisation, the Treaty of Alexandropol was superseded by the treaties of Moscow and Kars, which ceded Kars, Ardahan and Surmalu, including Ani and Mount Ararat, to Turkey. Armenia formally joined the USSR with Georgia and Azerbaijan in the TSFSR in March 1922.

A decree of the Soviet Armenian government established the state cinema body on 16 April 1923, followed by the Armenfilm studio in Yerevan in March 1924. The industry produced the first Armenian silent feature, Namus, in 1925 and the first sound film, Pepo, in 1935.

Repression in Armenia, with Lavrentiy Beria conspicuous, began with the death of the popular Soviet Armenian leader Aghasi Khanjian in 1936 and killed figures such as Yeghishe Charents, Axel Bakunts and Vahan Totovents. The Armenian Church also suffered, culminating in the murder of Catholicos Khoren I.

In December 1936 the Transcaucasian federation was divided into the Armenian, Azerbaijan and Georgian SSRs. Armenia thereby became a full union republic in its own right, the administrative basis of the state that became independent in 1991.

Though no battles were fought on its soil, nearly a third of Armenia's population served and 175,000 died; 117 citizens were made Hero of the Soviet Union. Six divisions were formed in 1941–42, one held back to guard the Turkish frontier, and Armenians rose to admiral and to three marshalcies of the Soviet Union.

Two years before Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Mikoyan flew to Yerevan and called for the rehabilitation of Charents and the republication of Patkanian and Raffi. The Thaw brought rapid improvement in housing and the consumer economy, and the Armenian Church revived when Catholicos Vazgen I took office in 1955.

Mass demonstrations on the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide in 1965 led to the construction of a memorial at Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan in 1967. In the same year a statue of Mother Armenia replaced the Stalin monument pulled down in 1962, marking a sanctioned national revival.

War broke out in 1988 over the primarily Armenian-populated region, and the struggle escalated after both countries attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The long conflict continues to preoccupy Armenian leaders.

Under glasnost, Armenians of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast demanded unification with Soviet Armenia, and by early 1988 nearly a million people were demonstrating in Yerevan's Theatre Square. Anti-Armenian violence in Sumgait and ensuing ethnic rioting foreclosed a peaceful settlement and set the stage for war.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's party took 49.8 per cent of the vote on 7 June 2026, securing a fresh mandate after presiding over the peace agreement with Azerbaijan. The result confirmed Armenia's continued shift toward the European Union and away from Russia.

The summit took place in Yerevan on 5 May 2026 as Armenia continued to deepen ties with Brussels following the 2025 peace deal with Azerbaijan. It followed the National Assembly's 2025 vote to launch Armenia's EU membership process.

Ankara removed a longstanding barrier to direct commerce with Armenia on 13 May 2026, part of a gradual normalisation that has also eased visa rules between the two countries. Turkey and Armenia have had no diplomatic relations and a closed land border since the 1990s.

Moscow's consumer safety regulator halted imports of Jermuk mineral water and several wine and cognac brands, citing quality concerns. The move came amid rising diplomatic tension between Russia and Armenia over Yerevan's pivot toward the West.

Vance travelled to Yerevan on 9 February 2026, underscoring Washington's growing role in the South Caucasus after brokering the 2025 Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal. The visit followed months of deepening US engagement with the region.

The agreement, signed on 10 February 2026, covers cooperation on civilian nuclear energy for a country whose sole nuclear plant, Metsamor, has long relied on Russian fuel and expertise. It followed the US vice-president's visit to Yerevan the previous day.

Officials confirmed Armenia's aim was EU membership rather than NATO accession, having already frozen participation in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation in 2024. The stance reflected an effort to diversify security ties without directly antagonising Moscow.

The 29 December 2025 agreement eased travel for diplomatic, special and service passport holders from both countries, another step in the gradual normalisation of relations. The two neighbours have no formal diplomatic ties and their land border has been closed since the 1990s.

Ajapahyan was sentenced to two years in prison on 3 October 2025, months after his June 2025 arrest alongside fellow Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan. The prosecutions formed part of a wider confrontation between the government and church leaders opposed to territorial concessions to Azerbaijan.

The 15 October 2025 arrests were part of a wider crackdown on Armenian Apostolic Church clerics accused of coercing citizens into protests, theft and electoral obstruction. Church leaders had campaigned against Prime Minister Pashinyan's government.

On 12 February 2025 parliament passed legislation officially endorsing Armenia's accession to the European Union, following Pashinyan's 2024 statements on applying for candidacy. The vote formalised a strategic reorientation towards the West.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and President Ilham Aliyev signed a joint declaration on 8 August 2025 in a ceremony hosted by US President Donald Trump, aiming to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Armenia agreed to grant the United States development rights over a transit corridor to Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan exclave.

In February 2024 Pashinyan said the Russian-led alliance had not fulfilled its security obligations and that participation was effectively frozen, telling the National Assembly on 28 February that the CSTO was a threat to national security. In March Armenia expelled Russian border guards from Zvartnots International Airport, marking a decisive turn away from Moscow.

Ratification in October 2023 made Armenia a full member of the ICC. The step, taken weeks after the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, further strained relations with Russia.

Between 19 and 20 September 2023 Azerbaijan attacked the breakaway state of Artsakh after a blockade that caused severe shortages of food and medicine; the European Parliament called it a violation of the 2020 ceasefire. A Russian-mediated ceasefire followed on 20 September, and by 1 October almost the entire Armenian population of some 139,000 had fled to Armenia amid warnings of ethnic cleansing.

Armen Sarkissian resigned in January 2022 saying the constitution left the presidency without sufficient powers, and parliament elected Khachaturyan in a second round on 3 March 2022. Further protests broke out the following month.

Pashinyan's party won the snap poll of 20 June 2021 held in the wake of defeat in Karabakh, and he was reappointed prime minister by President Sarkissian. The result confirmed the post-revolutionary settlement despite the war.

Full-scale war erupted on 27 September 2020 over the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, with heavy military and civilian casualties, thousands of soldiers killed on both sides. Six weeks of fighting ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire on 10 November under which Azerbaijan regained the surrounding territories and part of Nagorno-Karabakh itself; the agreement was widely seen as Armenia's capitulation and triggered the year-long March of Dignity protests that forced early elections.

Constitutional reform curtailing presidential power and strengthening the prime minister took effect in April 2018, with parliament electing Armen Sarkissian president in March. The change relocated executive authority to the premiership just as the Velvet Revolution unfolded.

Weeks of peaceful anti-government protests from April to May 2018, led by parliamentarian Nikol Pashinyan of the Civil Contract party, opposed Serzh Sargsyan's third consecutive term and Republican Party rule and forced his resignation in April 2018. Parliament elected Pashinyan prime minister the following month, ending two decades of rule by the Republican Party, and press freedom rose considerably thereafter.

After completing but not signing an Association Agreement with a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area in 2013, Armenia concluded CEPA with the EU on 24 November 2017. The agreement preserved a Western institutional track alongside Armenia's Russian alignment.

In September 2013 President Serzh Sargsian announced that Armenia would join Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan as a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, turning away from an EU association agreement.

The strategy aimed to make Armenia a knowledge-based economy competitive within the European Research Area, supported by an Action Plan approved in June 2011 and a Law on the National Academy of Sciences adopted in May 2011. Research spending nonetheless averaged only 0.25% of GDP over 2010–2013 against a world average of 1.7%.

Surveys at the Areni-1 cave complex in 2010 and 2011 produced the oldest known leather shoe, skirt and wine-producing facility. The finds established Armenia as a site of exceptionally early technological and agricultural innovation.

On 10 October 2009 Armenia and Turkey signed protocols setting a timetable for restoring diplomatic ties and reopening their joint border, closed since 1993, as senior Armenian leaders pursued rapprochement. Turkey has not ratified the protocols; relations remained tense and no formal diplomatic ties were established.

Primary care services became free in 2006 as part of post-independence health reform. In 2019 healthcare became free for all citizens under 18 and the Basic Benefits Package was widened.

In 2004 Armenian troops deployed with the NATO-led international force in Kosovo. The deployment marked Armenia's first substantial contribution to a Western-led peace operation.

The government acceded to the WTO on 5 February 2003, integrating the landlocked economy into the multilateral trading system. It followed a decade of liberalising investment and privatisation legislation.

Membership committed Armenia to the European Convention on Human Rights and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. It marked a step toward closer integration with European institutions.

Since 1995 the Azgayin Zhoghov has held legislative power, a unicameral parliament of 105 members. It provided the constitutional framework of the semi-presidential republic that lasted until 2018.

The plant's reopening in 1995 restored electricity supply and underpinned the return to strong economic growth. In 2018 the existing plant was scheduled for modernisation to improve safety and raise output by around 10%.

Ter-Petrosyan and defence minister Vazgen Sargsyan led Armenia through the first Nagorno-Karabakh war with Azerbaijan, which ended in a Russian-brokered ceasefire in May 1994. An estimated 30,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands — by some counts over a million — displaced on both sides, and the truce left Karabakh Armenian forces holding practically the entire former NKAO and most of seven adjacent Azerbaijani districts, territory they retained until 2020.

Having competed for the USSR before 1992 and as part of a unified CIS team at Barcelona, Armenia entered the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer under its own flag. Its first medals as an independent state came at Atlanta in 1996 in wrestling.

A liberal foreign investment law was approved in June 1994 and a privatisation law adopted in 1997 alongside a state property privatisation programme. The reforms underpinned the post-war economic turnaround and sustained growth from 1995.

Armenia joined the NPT in July 1993, having signed the Chemical Weapons Convention in March of the same year. These accessions established the republic's non-proliferation credentials despite ongoing war.

The dram was introduced in 1993 and suffered hyperinflation in its first years. Monetary stabilisation followed the mid-1990s recovery, and inflation has since been negligible.

Azerbaijan's blockade cut off the 85% of Armenian cargo and goods that arrived by rail, debilitating the economy, and Turkey joined it in 1993, shutting the common border in support of Azerbaijan during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The resulting landlocked isolation compounded the energy crisis, hampered economic growth and remains a structural constraint on Armenian trade.

Ratification in July 1992 bound Armenia to comprehensive limits on key categories of military equipment. It formed part of a rapid series of arms-control commitments by the new state.

Armenia became a UN member on 2 March 1992 and signed up to numerous UN organisations and international agreements. Membership anchored the new republic in the international system months after independence.

The Armenian military was created after the Soviet collapse, with the Ministry of Defence established in 1992. Active forces now number about 81,000 with a further 32,000 reservists.

On 21 September 1991, after the failed August coup in Moscow, Armenia officially declared independence, with more than 99 per cent of voters backing it in a referendum. Levon Ter-Petrosyan was popularly elected the first president of the newly independent republic in October, and independence was recognised as the Soviet Union formally dissolved under the Belovezha Accords in December 1991.

In the early 1990s Armenia overhauled the centralised Soviet education system, and most schools teaching in Russian had closed by the end of 1991. The change consolidated national language use while Russian remained widely known.

The population reached 3.6 million in 1991 and then fell through heavy emigration after the Soviet breakup, standing at 3,081,100 in 2025. Emigration slowed after 2012 and some population growth has since been observed.

Nagorno-Karabakh declared itself independent of Azerbaijan in 1991 and was supported by Armenia thereafter. Its status defined Armenian foreign and security policy for three decades until Azerbaijan reincorporated the region in 2023.

On 23 August 1990 Armenia declared sovereignty, reflecting disillusionment with Gorbachev's failure to address the republic's crises. On 17 March 1991 it joined the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldova in boycotting the all-Union referendum on preserving the USSR.

A pogrom in Baku in January 1990 forced almost all of the 200,000 Armenians in the Azerbaijani capital to flee. The mass displacement deepened the humanitarian burden on Armenia and hardened the conflict with Azerbaijan.

The shutdown of the nuclear power plant in 1989 triggered the energy crisis of the 1990s, and GDP fell nearly 60% between 1989 and 1993. Robust growth resumed only after the plant was reopened in 1995.

The 1988 earthquake, of surface-wave magnitude 6.8, killed more than 25,000 people and left 500,000 homeless. Its effects on housing and infrastructure were still being felt long after independence and compounded the crises of the transition years.