May 2024 was tense, given the conflicting internal political processes taking place in Armenia and Georgia. Armenia is having a hard time overcoming the consequences of the military defeat against Azerbaijan and the loss of Karabakh. Baku calls Yerevan's recognition of the inevitability of the creation of the Zangezur Corridor between the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and the Caspian Sea a prerequisite for the demarcation of the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia. For this, Armenia must hand over four border villages to Azerbaijan. This provoked protests that quickly spread to Yerevan. Considering the fact that the pro-Russian Armenian opposition has long discredited itself, representatives of the Armenian Church became the leaders of the protests. The Russian state propaganda machine openly criticizes the "traitor" of the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan. But he in no way manifests radical anti-Russian sentiments. On the contrary, despite the declaration of the inevitability of withdrawal from the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Armenia has not yet done so. The Russian military base, including Armenian citizens who are Russian contractors, remains in Gyumri. Russian border guards remain on the Armenian-Turkish border. Finally, on June 1, 2024, the Kremlin dictator personally congratulated Nikol Pashinyan on his birthday by phone. That is, the Kremlin demonstrates that it does not seek to remove Pashinyan from power through street protests. Especially since the Armenian opposition is unable to offer a realistic alternative program. Armenia, despite attempts to rearm itself through the efforts of arms suppliers from France and India, is not ready for a new hot war with Azerbaijan. Yerevan has no other option but to carry out the unpopular demarcation of the border with Azerbaijan. Therefore, Pashinyan conducts a classic "real political course", balancing the internal dissatisfaction of fairly broad sections of Armenian society with a "multi-vector" foreign policy. On the one hand, this is due to the different orientation vectors of the Armenian diaspora, on the other hand, the desire to make capital on shadow ties with the sanctioned Russian Federation and simultaneous flirting with the USA and France. Such balancing requires a fine sense of the balance of opposing interests. But since 2019, Pashinyan has demonstrated miracles of political survival, so he is optimistic about maintaining his power even now. Chaotization of the internal political process in Armenia still seems unlikely. Pashinyan firmly holds the levers of power.
In Georgia, the local Orthodox Church supported the Georgian Dream party, which passed a law on the transparency of foreign influence through parliament. The document obliges non-governmental organizations (yet not individuals) to report to the Ministry of Justice on obtaining the status of a foreign agent if 20% of the non-governmental organization's funding comes from foreign sources. The specificity of the internal political environment in Georgia is due to the presence of many "minority" parties that are present in the parliament and will receive state budget funding. This enables the ruling party to pursue a divide-and-conquer policy. The dispersed opposition united against the "Russian law on foreign agents". But the ruling party "Georgian Dream" hopes that the opposition will fall out during the election campaign, because parliamentary elections are to be held in Georgia in October. Because the new law limits the work of independent observers at polling stations, the ruling party has wide room for maneuver in the provincial periphery outside Tbilisi, Kutaisi and Batumi. Therefore, the victory of the Georgian opposition is far from guaranteed. The informal leader of the "Georgian Dream" Bidzina Ivanishvili hopes that the European Union will not dare to cancel the status of Georgia as a candidate country for joining the EU. Ivanishvili is no longer surprised by US sanctions. Russia hopes to keep the Georgian ruling party in power. However, the regime of Western sanctions may prevent Georgia from being a "door" for Russian business structures to circumvent their own sanctions. In the radical scenarios of the development of the situation, one cannot rule out Georgia's descent into a state of civil war similar to the beginning of the 1990s, the price of which was the loss of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.