The announcement came at 13:29 Moscow time on Monday, in Interfax's rendering of the Kremlin spokesman's briefing. The visit "will take place in the near future"; the exact dates "will be agreed through diplomatic channels, with the working schedules of the heads of state in mind". Vedomosti's account of the same briefing supplies the sequence: Putin proposed the meeting, Pashinyan accepted.
Then the agenda. "The heads of state will have the opportunity to discuss once more, from all sides, the main subject of our bilateral relations: the choice of the direction of development, Armenia's orientation, and the holding of the corresponding referendum," Peskov said.
That is a different subject from the one Yerevan closed a week ago. In Bishkek on 1 September, after the meeting Peskov now calls "important and substantive", Pashinyan said the time to decide on EU membership had not come and dropped the referendum on it. Putin, for his part, offered to leave the base at Gyumri "even tomorrow" and asked whether Armenia was ready for that.
Moscow is choosing the venue and the vocabulary.
So the two capitals now describe one meeting in two tenses: in Yerevan's version the referendum question is closed, in Moscow's it is the main open item, to be taken up "once more". A referendum is the one instrument that would turn Armenia's choice into a result Moscow can hold Yerevan to; a decision taken by a government and the parliament that approved its programme 63 votes to 24 in August can be revised by the next ones. The vocabulary is the substance.
Moscow is choosing the venue and the vocabulary. The host announced the visit, the host named its subject, and the host set the horizon at "the near future". Nothing that reached the wires we read has matched any of the three from the Armenian side. No confirmation of the visit, its dates or its agenda had reached Armenpress's Russian-language front by 15:07 on Tuesday, and the front of news.am carried none either; the prime minister's newest published engagement there was a meeting with the Oxford alumni business club.
The date has a calendar to fit around. On 15 September the Constitutional Court examines the TRIPP arrangements. A meeting before that sitting puts Pashinyan in the Kremlin with the court's view unknown; a meeting after it may put him there with the court's answer in hand. Peskov gave no indication which, and "the near future" covers both.
What changes next is measurable in one word. The readout Yerevan publishes after the meeting, whenever it comes, will either contain the word referendum or it will not. Since 1 September the Armenian position has been that the referendum is off the table; the Kremlin's, since Monday, that it is the main subject. One side will give. Until then the announcement itself is the fact: an invitation issued and accepted, on the host's terms, with no reply from the guest on the record by Tuesday afternoon.