Like many I spoke to, Jenny didn’t like any of the candidates in Sunday’s election. Nor is she happy with Pashinyan’s reconciliation attempts with Turkey. If she could improve one thing about her country, what would it be? “Better teachers! They’re teaching all kinds of crazy lies to our kids these days.” Like what? “That Turks are the good ones and Armenians the terrorists.” I say I don’t follow. That doesn’t sound like the narrative I would have expected. “You’re right!” she cries. “They’re trying to change the narrative! They’re trying to change the story. But we don’t want to change the story and we don’t want to change the narrative.”

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The Turkish border was far from the only contentious territorial issue in the June elections. Of equal importance was the Zangezur corridor, a proposed 43-kilometer route to connect Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan and Turkey by slicing across the Iranian-Armenian border. The project is also known by its new American backers as TRIPP: the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. At a White House summit in August 2025, both Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev signed off on the road and rail corridor to be built and managed by a US-led consortium for the first 99 years.

For all its hype, the proposed corridor risks aggravating Iran’s own byway through the country, the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), construction on which is already well underway. Backed by Russia and India as a part of a broader route from the Indian Ocean to Russia and the Black Sea, an early installment of INSTC worth $215 million is already being tunneled 32 kilometers up from Iran through the southern Armenian mountains. In the quiet border city of Meghri, where old men sit on corners and Ladas go to languish, Iranian concrete pourers and construction crews are fast at work on the first tranche.