Armenia’s intelligence service says war with Azerbaijan ‘highly unlikely’ in 2026
OC Media
In its annual report, Armenia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has stated that a war with Azerbaijan in 2026 was ‘highly unlikely’, while forecasting that Armenia will ‘almost certainly’ not unfreeze its membership in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).
The 26-page report was published on Tuesday, detailing a number of military, political, and hybrid risks Armenia could face in 2026.
It concluded that a military escalation between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2026 had ‘become highly unlikely’ following the Washington Summit in August 2025, where the two countries initialed, but not yet signed, a peace deal under US mediation.
In its detailed subsection about military risks pertaining to the conflict with Azerbaijan, the report assessed that it was highly likely that progress would be achieved in the two countries’ border delimitation process, bilateral trade, economic initiatives, and dialogue. It added that progress would also likely be reached in unblocking regional transit links.
However, it warned that ‘states with the goal of maintaining and expanding their influence in the region’ posed ‘risks of malign activities’ against such progress — a likely reference to Russia, with whom both Armenia and Azerbaijan maintain uneasy relations.
It did note that state-promoted narratives from Baku referring to parts of Armenia as ‘western Azerbaijan’ also posed a risk to peace-building in the long run, adding that Azerbaijan had ‘increased this propaganda since the Washington Declaration’, instead of reducing it.
The agency laid out the continuous assessment of this narrative as a priority task for itself, in order to conclude whether these narratives formed the basis of a ‘new national ideology’ Azerbaijan intended to use in the conflict — possibly as a bargaining chip for the return of Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh.
It also said that it observed an increase in Azerbaijan’s military expenditure, which they assessed as a risk factor ‘not only due to the net increase of military spending, but also the fact that the growth rate of military expenditure substantially exceeds that of spending on other sectors’.
The agency’s assessment of Armenia’s relations with the CSTO was brief, offering a single paragraph predicting that the ‘unfreezing’ of Armenia’s membership in the security bloc will ‘almost certainly not happen’.
Armenia ‘froze’ its CSTO membership in early 2024, citing the organization’s failure to come to Armenia’s defence in the wake of Azerbaijani attacks on their shared border.
The intelligence agency’s assessment of hybrid threats was by far the longest section of the report.
It concluded that hybrid threats against Armenia in 2026 would ‘highly likely become more comprehensive, complex, and large-scale’ in the run-up to the 2026 parliamentary elections. The report said that it was highly likely that hybrid warfare would be employed to influence the implementation of the Trump Route, or TRIPP.
The Trump Route, agreed to by Azerbaijan and Armenia in the Washington Summit, would see the establishment of transit links between Azerbaijan and Nakchhivan through Armenian territory.
While the report has not singled out Russia as being behind the ‘hybrid war’ against Armenia, officials have repeatedly accused Moscow of employing various tactics against it, including disinformation campaigns, and other attempts to interfere in Armenia’s domestic affairs.
