staff asks for his resignation, Nikol Pachinian denounces an attempted military coup. The Armenian Prime Minister did not hesitate to strongly accuse the general staff, Thursday, February 25, after these calls to resign when he is somewhat weakened since his setback against Azerbaijan. “I consider the statement by the general staff to be an attempted military coup. I invite all our supporters to gather on Republic Square, ”in Yerevan, he wrote on his Facebook page.
In a live speech on this social network that he likes, Nikol Pachinian then announced the dismissal of General Onik Gasparian from the head of the general staff. The head of government has planned to visit Place de la République himself and will address his supporters at 4 p.m. (12 p.m. GMT). He assured, still on Facebook, that “the police will ensure the security of the gathering”. The opposition, which calls for the departure of Nikol Pachinian since the Armenian military defeat against Azerbaijan in Nagorno Karabakh at the end of 2020, is also calling for demonstrations on Thursday.
The worried Kremlin
The day before, Nikol Pachinian had dismissed Tigran Khatchatrian, the deputy of General Gasparian, which had led the staff to demand his resignation in a press release, judging that the Prime Minister was “no longer able to take decisions that are needed ”. They accused him of “attacks intended to discredit the armed forces”. The Prime Minister had sacked Tigran Khatchatrian, because the latter had mocked in the press his statements questioning the reliability of a Russian weapon system, the Iskander missile launchers, during the Karabakh conflict.
The general staff ruled that this decision was based solely “on the feelings and personal ambitions” of Nikol Pachinian. The Kremlin, saying it is “concerned” by the situation, called for “calm” in this former Soviet republic. “We are following the situation in Armenia with concern […] and of course we call on everyone to calm, ”Russian presidency spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
A defeat in Azerbaijan that undermines the prime minister
The Armenian Prime Minister has been under pressure from the opposition for weeks, demanding his resignation. At the time, faced with the risk of a debacle, he had accepted, with the support of the army and his staff, the conditions of a cease-fire negotiated by Russian President Vladimir Poutin and which implied significant territorial losses for Armenia. Yerevan still controls de facto, thanks to the presence of Armenian separatists, most of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
But Armenia has lost the symbolic city of Choucha, as well as a glacier of Azerbaijani regions surrounding the region and it has controlled since the 1990s. This defeat has been experienced as a national humiliation, and the opposition has been trying to snatch the departure of the Prime Minister who had assured almost to the end of the conflict, which lasted from September to November 2020, that his forces had the advantage.
Nikol Pachinian, a former journalist and historical opponent who went through prison, came to power in the spring of 2018, driven by a revolution promising to lift this Caucasian country out of poverty and uproot a corrupt elite. Armenia, since its independence with the fall of the USSR in 1991, has known a succession of political crises and revolts, some of which were deadly.
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