U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed support for Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during a short stopover at Zvartnots International Airport on May 26, less than two weeks before Armenia’s parliamentary elections.
Rubio’s visit lasted roughly one hour and took place entirely inside the airport during a refueling stop on his return from a four-day trip to India.
During the visit, Rubio and the U.S. administration remained silent on the rights of Artsakh Armenians, Armenian hostages still held in Baku, and the ongoing destruction and erasure of Armenian cultural and religious heritage following the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh’s indigenous Armenian population.
Instead, Rubio met Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan to sign a series of strategic agreements deepening U.S.-Armenia cooperation in areas including transit infrastructure, critical minerals, defense, AI, and regional connectivity, while openly backing Pashinyan’s government just 12 days before the elections.
Despite the scale of the announcements, the full text of the agreement was not immediately released, and it remained unclear what concrete new steps the two countries would actually take.
In January, the U.S. State Department outlined a framework in which Armenia would give the United States a 74% stake in a new “TRIPP Development Company,” explicitly designed to benefit American companies and tied to a major transit corridor connecting Azerbaijan to Nakhijevan through Armenian territory.
Rubio praised Armenia’s current leadership for “blazing the trail” toward Armenia’s future, despite growing concerns over democratic backsliding and political crackdowns in Armenia itself.
The visit follows U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s February 2026 trip to Yerevan, the first ever visit by a sitting American vice president to Armenia, signaling an increasingly visible U.S. political involvement in Armenia’s internal and regional affairs ahead of the parliamentary elections.
