In his roughly 20 hours in Yerevan, Prime Minister Mark Carney will have only a brief window to engage with Armenia’s political leadership before the European Political Community summit — where Canada has been invited as a guest of honour — gets underway.

Carney is expected to meet with Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan just hours after landing at Zvartnots International Airport, but the rest of his agenda will be largely focused on European leaders.

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The EPC summit is a twice-yearly event that brings together members of the European Union, as well as some neighbouring countries on Europe’s periphery in Asia. The first gathering took place just months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to attend this one.

“At the Summit, the prime minister will meet with European leaders to reinforce collective security and transatlantic defence readiness, while advancing support for Ukraine,” a statement from Carney’s office said shortly before the trip.

Most of the statement focused on Canada-EU ties, with Carney quoted as saying: “Canada is moving ever closer to our European partners and allies. Bound by our shared values, we are advancing cooperation in defence, energy and technology to build a more secure and prosperous future on both sides of the Atlantic.”

But Canada has recently been deepening ties with Armenia as well. Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, was the first Canadian prime minister to visit the country, travelling there in 2018 as it hosted the Francophonie summit. Ottawa opened a Canadian embassy in Yerevan in 2023, and Canada even became the first non-EU country to join the European Union Mission in Armenia, a civilian monitoring mission set up to observe the Armenia-Azerbaijan border after the two countries fought a bloody territorial war over Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020.

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Christopher Waters, an international law professor at the University of Windsor, said Armenia’s geographic position should make it a country of significant interest to Canada.

“The conditions are right to increase student exchanges, economic relations. Canada [can] take advantage of having an ally and a friend in a difficult neighbourhood, one which is increasingly looking to the West, looking to Canada and its allies, looking to Europe to get away, frankly, from the Russian sphere of influence,” he said

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Armenia is part of NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme, or DEEP, which is designed for non-member countries, “providing tailored practical support … in developing and reforming their professional military educational institutions.”

Whitehorn said Canada already works with Armenia through DEEP, but could also pursue a more direct bilateral relationship.

Meanwhile, the fact that Armenia is hosting the summit at all is itself a sign of the country’s drift away from Russia, said Robert Huebert of the University of Calgary.

“It’s … a message to Putin that his threats, that he keeps threatening NATO, saying you can’t come close to my border. And I think that this is a means of saying we can go where we want.”

“I think it’s also in an effort to show Putin that we’ve got major interest here. If people want to make common cause with us, we will recognize that.”