By Andranik Aboyan
It is a curious trait of dependent nations that their elites forever oscillate between masters while calling it a march toward independence. In Nikol Pashinyan’s Armenia, this oscillation has become an artform. Having lost Artsakh under the false banner of peace, he now dangles the Zangezur Corridor before foreign powers as the next bargaining chip—promising infrastructure, investment, and security, while mortgaging what little is left of Armenia’s political future. In this scheme, sovereignty is not defended—it is leased.
Consider the latest development whispered in diplomatic circles: the United States, we’re told, has floated a proposal to lease the Zangezur Corridor for 100 years, to be operated by a private foreign company. If true, this would be a colonial concession in everything but name—a corridor run not by Armenians, nor even by a state, but by capital itself. It is the British East India Company model in 21st-century wrapping.
Pashinyan calls it national strategy. But if this is a strategy, then so was the sale of Manhattan for glass beads. Only now, we’re doing it backwards: giving up the land, and buying the beads ourselves on credit.
From Red Rail to Red Ink
In 2008, Armenia handed control of its railways to South Caucasus Railway, a Russian Railways subsidiary, for 30 years. This was framed as modernization. Now, in the context of the corridor talks, that same privatization has become an obstacle. Why? Because to build new rail lines not under Russian jurisdiction, Armenia must either violate the 2008 deal or renationalize them—at a projected cost of $358 million.
This, after already being dragged into international arbitration by Walnort (for its 12.5% stake in ZCMC, demanding $1.2 billion) and facing another potential $1.13 billion suit from the Karapetyan family over ENA. All this while the country’s debt hovers at $13.7 billion, already surpassing 50% of GDP. If these arbitration claims go through, Armenia’s debt-to-GDP ratio will rocket past 60%, plunging the country into structural dependency—not on Russia, but on Western creditors and arbitration courts.
Paul Mattick once wrote that capitalism doesn’t solve its crises—it merely moves them around. In Armenia, the crisis is being moved from the battlefield of Artsakh to the books of the Ministry of Finance.
Corridor Politics: A Sovereignty Shell Game
What is the Zangezur Corridor if not a test case in the new logic of imperialism—where states are no longer invaded, but outbid?
Today’s leadership thinks it can hedge Russian power by placing the West in charge of the country’s most strategic strip of land.
This is not non-alignment. This is the outsourcing of sovereignty. A corridor operated by a private firm, backed by NATO interests, is not a corridor for trade—it is a corridor for capital, enforced by legal contracts and protected by debt leverage. Once built, its permanence will be defined not by laws, but by ratings agencies.
And it is here that Pashinyan’s rhetoric collapses into comedy. The man who chides Soviet nostalgia now plans to use public debt to repurchase infrastructure once privatized by his own neoliberal allies—just to re-privatize it again under new Western masters. Armenia is being auctioned off twice, and the public is paying both times.
Armenians Must Not Be Silent
The tragedy is that much of the Armenian opposition has been too willing to see these developments only in geopolitical terms—Russia vs. the West—when in truth, the real war is being fought in the realm of political economy.
The corridor question is not about alignment. It is about ownership, control, and debt. And here, the Pashinyan regime has been clear: it would rather let Armenia be ruled by boards of directors than risk reintroducing anything resembling popular control of infrastructure.
If there is a future to be salvaged from this descent into corridor colonialism, it will come not from courts or consultants, but from the Armenian public willing to say what neither Pashinyan nor his critics will: that this is not a crisis of diplomacy, but of the system we are governed by itself.
