On May 26, Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Yerevan for what his team described as a working visit: one hour on the ground, flying in from India and back to Washington. In that single hour, three agreements were signed between Armenia and the United States. The texts were published the same day, but the ongoing election campaign consumed the public conversation entirely. Now that Armenians have voted and the political landscape has somewhat settled, this is the right moment to read those agreements with clear eyes and ask what they actually mean for the country. The one that deserves the closest reading is also the one that received the least attention: the memorandum on critical minerals and rare earths.
Text : Arshak Tovmasyan
Three deals, one hour
To understand the minerals agreement, it helps to see it alongside the two documents signed with it.
The first and most symbolic is the Charter on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, an overarching framework that upgrades the bilateral relationship and formalizes commitments made at the August 2025 Washington summit between Pashinyan and Trump. It is a broad document, covering territory from nuclear energy and semiconductors to defense sales and cultural heritage preservation. Its practical significance lies less in any single provision than in the political signal it sends: The United States and Armenia now regard their relationship as one of strategic depth, not merely diplomatic courtesy.
The second is the initialing of the TRIPP Framework Agreement, the operational blueprint for the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. TRIPP is the transit corridor intended to connect Azerbaijan’s main territory with its Nakhchivan exclave through Armenia’s southern Syunik region, along a 43-kilometre route that traces a Soviet-era railway. The infrastructure envisioned includes rail, road, natural gas pipeline, fiber-optic and electricity transmission lines. A joint venture company would be incorporated in Delaware as a subsidiary of the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, holding a 74 percent controlling stake for an initial period of 49 years, with Armenia holding the remaining 26 percent. After an optional 50-year extension, Armenia’s stake would rise to 49 percent. Construction is expected to begin in the second half of 2026. The documents affirm that Armenia retains full sovereignty over its territory and borders, though, as we will return to, the practical meaning of sovereignty over infrastructure you do not control is a question the text does not fully resolve.
The third agreement is the Memorandum of Understanding on the mining and processing of critical minerals and rare earths. It was signed in the same room, in the same hour, with the same handshakes. It has generated a fraction of the coverage.
It was Rubio’s first visit to Armenia. It was only the third time in Armenia’s history that a sitting U.S. Secretary of State has visited the country at all.
The minerals deal: what we know
Critical minerals are one of the defining geopolitical contests of the 2020s. The global race to secure lithium, cobalt, molybdenum, rare earths and other materials essential to electric vehicles, semiconductors, defense systems and clean energy infrastructure has reshaped diplomacy from Latin America to Central Asia. Washington has been signing similar framework agreements across the globe, with Ukraine, with Congo, with Kazakhstan, as it attempts to build supply chains that reduce dependence on Chinese processing capacity.
Armenia is not a marginal player in this space. The country has known deposits of copper, molybdenum and gold, with the Zangezur copper-molybdenum combine among the largest operations of its kind in the post-Soviet region. More recent assessments have flagged potential for rare earth deposits, though the geological picture remains incomplete. That last point is significant: the text of the framework, published by Armenia’s Foreign Ministry after the signing, explicitly commits both sides to creating a modern geological map of Armenia using satellite-assisted technology, specifically to identify minerals that Soviet-era surveys overlooked. In other words, neither side yet knows exactly what is in the ground. The mapping comes first.
Rubio put the logic plainly at the signing ceremony: access to strategic resources is increasingly essential, but the real value lies in the ability to process and refine them. Countries that master the full chain, from extraction to finished goods, will find economic independence and place themselves at the center of innovation. Armenian Foreign Minister Mirzoyan described the document as opening “unprecedented horizons” for the country, including in artificial intelligence and other strategic domains. Prime Minister Pashinyan emphasized that rare minerals have become strategically important precisely because of artificial intelligence and modern technology manufacturing.
What the official framing does not tell us
The official framing is confident on both sides. What it is less forthcoming about, and what any serious reading of this agreement demands, is the substance beneath the headlines.
Which minerals, specifically?
The framework covers “critical minerals and rare earths” as a category, and the published text is clear that both existing domestic operations and new capacity are in scope. Armenia’s existing mining sector is overwhelmingly copper and molybdenum. Whether the deal will eventually extend to rare earth prospecting, which the satellite mapping initiative suggests is at least the ambition, or whether it is primarily a framework to bring existing operations into alignment with U.S. supply-chain preferences, remains to be seen. These are very different propositions with very different implications for Armenia’s economy and environment.
What does Armenia receive economically?
The published framework text does contain one concrete commitment on financing: within six months of signing, both sides intend to explore measures to facilitate “potentially significant financing” for projects that generate end products for delivery to buyers in both countries. Priority is to be given to projects that locate separation, refining and value-added processing inside Armenia. That is a meaningful provision, but it is also still an intention, not a commitment. The architecture of investment, revenue-sharing and technology transfer has not yet been determined.
How does this interact with Armenia’s existing mining sector?
Armenia’s mining industry has long been a source of domestic controversy, over environmental standards, over the share of revenues that remain in the country, over the influence of large operators on national policy. A new framework with Washington does not automatically resolve those fault lines. On the contrary, it raises new ones: will U.S. involvement raise environmental and governance standards, or will it primarily redirect the extractive surplus toward a different set of partners? The framework text does note that site restoration is a priority alongside processing. How that is enforced will matter.
What is the relationship between TRIPP and the minerals deal?
The two agreements were signed on the same day and together form part of a broader economic architecture the Trump administration is building around Armenian territory. TRIPP creates a transit corridor; the minerals framework locks Armenia into a U.S. supply-chain structure. Read separately, each has its own logic. Read together, they represent a substantial deepening of American economic presence inside Armenia. The documents repeatedly affirm Armenian sovereignty. What those affirmations mean in practice, over a 49-year horizon, is a question that deserves more than diplomatic reassurance.
What does Russia think, and does it matter?
Rubio’s visit came two weeks before the June 7 parliamentary elections, which Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party went on to win with 49.8 percent of the vote. Moscow had already been publicly criticizing Yerevan for moving too close to the West, and Russia responded to Armenia’s westward drift with a sustained and escalating campaign of economic and political pressure, spanning trade restrictions across multiple sectors. The message from Moscow has been consistent: realignment comes at a cost. Whether the minerals framework alongside TRIPP increases Armenia’s long-term bargaining power with Moscow, or simply accelerates an already difficult rupture, is a question these agreements do not answer.
The shape of what is being built
Taken together, the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, TRIPP, the minerals framework, the EU summit of May 4 and 5, the Rubio visit, and the ongoing negotiations over EU accession prospects, a pattern is visible. Armenia is deliberately and methodically building a new set of external anchors. After three decades in which Russia was the default security and economic patron, Yerevan is distributing its dependencies: toward Washington on security and strategic resources, toward Brussels on trade and reform, toward both simultaneously on the question of legitimacy and international standing. The June 7 election result, in which Armenian voters returned Pashinyan’s pro-Western government despite sustained Russian pressure, suggests this direction has genuine popular backing.
This is a rational strategy for a small state that lost a war in 2020 and found its traditional patron either unable or unwilling to intervene meaningfully. It is also a strategy with risks that are not fully priced into the current optimism.
Deals signed in an hour, however historic their framing, are the beginning of a process, not its conclusion. The minerals framework will need to be converted into investment, into infrastructure, into a regulatory structure that balances Armenian interests with American supply-chain priorities. TRIPP will need to survive political pressures from Russia, from Azerbaijan, from Armenian domestic opposition, and from the structural complexity of building multimodal infrastructure across a region that remains far from fully stable.
The questions above are not arguments against these agreements. They are the questions that serious partners ask of serious deals. Armenia deserves answers to them, and so does anyone who wants to understand what kind of country Armenia is becoming.
TRIPP at a glance: 43km corridor through Syunik · 74% U.S. / 26% Armenia ownership · 49-year initial term · Construction start: H2 2026