Moscow sent a message that leaves no room for interpretation: Armenia no longer has any right to a single economic bonus if at the same time it's building a political coalition against Russia. The „two chairs" have collapsed.

Prime minister Nikol Pashinyan at a summit in Yerevan on 7 May, with Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Maia Sandu and Volodymyr Zelensky present, said: „Gathered here are states that chose the democratic path and want peace." He then added there is only one former Soviet republic that doesn't agree. Translation: Russia. Short, clean, no ambiguity.

Even more interesting: Pashinyan floated a new alliance of 14 former Soviet republics - without Moscow. In Russian political circles, that's no longer a „diplomatic disagreement." That's open anti-Russian positioning. And it comes from the head of a country that was in the Kremlin in April for a Putin meeting, and a month later was at the same summit with Moscow's loudest opponents.

The Moscow response came quickly. Leonid Kalashnikov, chairman of the Duma's CIS committee, said: „The matter must be raised immediately at the CSTO and EAEU summits." Translation: if Yerevan wants to go West politically, it will lose the Eurasian market. No ceremony.

And that Eurasian linkage isn't trivial. Armenia buys Russian gas at 177 dollars per thousand cubic metres. The EU price - around 600 dollars. Armenia exports duty-free to the Russian market - Russia accounts for 34 percent of the country's total foreign trade. Russian investments there exceed four billion dollars. No strategic partner can replace that complex within two weeks.

From Yerevan, the counter-response came at once. Speaker of parliament Alen Simonyan said Armenia will never be a „Russian governorate" and won't be run on the Belarusian model. Poetically strong. Economically easy to disprove.

For the Balkans, this is almost a mirror. All of us - Macedonia, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria - live the same kind of „two chairs." The EU wants us as a market, as a radar, as a buffer. Moscow holds us tied through gas, oil, banks. When one side decides „enough" - the bill is delivered without negotiation. And usually the diaspora pays first. Armenia is just showing us what happens when the game is uncovered.

The question nobody from Yerevan wants to answer at this stage is simple: if Russia really closes its market to Armenian goods, how will it feed the 2.5 million people who depend on that export? Will the EU absorb them? In how many years? And with how much tariff? Poetic declarations last an hour. The economy lasts decades.