Energy
Armenia Plans to Buy Gas From Four Suppliers as Moscow Signals Price Risk
September 22, 2026
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Armenia intends to purchase natural gas simultaneously from Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkey rather than replacing one dominant supplier with another, Security Council Secretary Alen Simonyan said at a briefing in Yerevan.
"Who said we are going to replace dependence on one country with dependence on another?" Simonyan said. "We are preparing to purchase gas from all possible sources — simultaneously from Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkey." He added that "gas is used as a political currency," and that price should not be measured in dollars alone.
The price that is at stake
Russian gas currently reaches the Armenian border at $165 per 1,000 cubic metres, a level unchanged since 1 January 2019. At the end of 2021 Yerevan and Moscow agreed to hold that price for ten years, and an intergovernmental protocol to that effect was signed in 2022. Gazprom Armenia, wholly owned by the Russian holding, remains the monopoly supplier for domestic consumption.
That arrangement is now openly in question. Russian Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilev has written to Armenia warning that the December 2013 agreement covering gas, petroleum products and rough diamonds could be suspended or denounced if Armenia continues its EU accession process. Tsivilev subsequently clarified that a move from the Eurasian Economic Union to the EU would mean Russia could not continue supplying at the current price.
President Vladimir Putin has put a figure on the broader cost, saying preliminary expert estimates suggest that rising energy prices following an Armenian exit from the EAEU could cost the country at least 14% of GDP.
How real is the alternative
Simultaneous four-way sourcing is a policy statement, not yet an infrastructure reality. Armenia has an existing pipeline connection to Iran under a long-running gas-for-electricity swap, which gives Tehran a genuine claim to be a second supplier. Azerbaijani and Turkish gas would require either new interconnection or transit arrangements that do not currently exist in commercial form, and both depend on the wider normalisation track.
Finance Minister Vahe Hovhannisyan said in late August that the government had modelled the consequences of a Russian price increase and intended to fold those calculations into its formal risk assessment framework — an indication that the fiscal authorities, at least, are treating the threat as a live scenario rather than rhetoric.
Why it matters commercially
Central Bank Chairman Martin Galstyan has described a sharp rise in Russian gas prices as a stress scenario rather than a baseline, while noting that such a move would feed inflation directly through utility tariffs and indirectly through production costs. The central bank raised its policy rate by 25 basis points to 6.75% on 15 September, its first increase since December 2022, citing inflation risks that include imported energy.
For Armenian industry, the practical exposure is input cost. For investors, the exposure is policy: an economy that depends on a single supplier for a politically contested commodity carries a risk premium until that dependence is genuinely diversified — not merely announced.
