A new round of heated conflict has resumed between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Armenia’s former leaders, with the sides accusing each other of dragging Armenia into the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The conflict resumed following a Facebook post by the first president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, in which he accused Pashinyan of declaring a war on Azerbaijan via his remarks in Stepanakert in 2019.
At the time, Pashinyan stated in the main square of the region’s capital that ‘Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] is Armenia, and that’s it’.
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Ter-Petrosyan further accused Pashinyan of ‘foolishly’ rejecting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to end the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in October 2020. He also blamed the ‘sacrifice [of] five thousand bright young men’ on Pashinyan, referring to the casualties Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians suffered during the 2020 war.
‘And after all this, you cynically declare and repeat every day and take pride in the fact that you have granted peace to the Armenian people, expecting, or rather, demanding their gratitude in return, but not receiving it, you pour all your bile on them’, Ter-Petrosyan said.
He also accused Pashinyan of hating Armenian’s independence, ‘because it was not he, but others who brought it’. Concluding his post, Ter-Petrosyan said that Pashinyan had already ‘secured his “honourable” place on the memorial plaque of notorious Armenian traitors’.
‘The famous trio avoiding the debate’
Starting on Monday evening, Pashinyan responded to these accusations with a series of social media posts.
‘When the people are happy, the famous trio avoiding the debate, is sad’, Pashinyan wrote, in a reference to Armenia’s three ex-presidents: Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan, and Serzh Sargsyan.
Previously, in December 2024, Pashinyan proposed a live debate with the three former presidents to discuss the decades-long negotiation process with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. All three refused Pashinyan’s invitation.
Unlike with Kocharyan and Sargsyan, Pashinyan was a former ally of Ter-Petrosyan; together they led a series of protests following the 2008 presidential election. However, their relations have severely deteriorated recently, with both sides harshly criticising each other.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
In a post on Tuesday morning, Pashinyan referred to the ex-presidents only by their initials, which seemed to reflect a lack of respect.
Responding to their ‘continuous’ claim that Pashinyan dragged Armenia into the war, Pashinyan asked the three of them — ‘If I’m the one who dragged Armenia into war, then what was an 18-year-old Armenian soldier doing outside the sovereign territory of [...] Armenia as of 2018?’, referring to Armenian citizens serving their mandatory military service in Nagorno-Karabakh.
He further asked them to clarify ‘why didn’t you send your grandchildren and children to the peace zone?’.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
In a subsequent post, Pashinyan directly accused all three of them of causing the conflict — ‘[Ter-Petrosyan] dragged Armenia into the war and fled. [Kocharyan] dragged Karabakh into the war and fled to Armenia. [Sargsyan] fled Karabakh earlier to enjoy the [money] he had collected at the Lachin post’.
Pashinyan further noted with irony that the three named as ‘victorious presidents’ never ‘received the people’s vote of confidence’.
It is widely believed that aside from the first presidential election in 1991, all subsequent elections up until the Velvet Revolution were unfair due to wide-scale bribery and election fraud.
Pashinyan also reiterated his call for debate over the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.
‘Never argue with an idiot’
Ter-Petrosyan was the only ex-leader who responded to Pashinyan directly on Wednesday, answering the accusation during a conference on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
Asked why he did not accept Pashinyan’s offer for debate, Ter-Petrosyan said that if Pashinyan publishes the negotiations documents, all of which were under his command, ‘the dispute will be over’.
Previously, on Tuesday, Levon Zurabyan, the deputy president of Ter-Petrosyan’s Armenian National Congress, also requested Ter-Petrosyan to allow him to debate with Pashinyan on his behalf. Zurabyan insisted that even imagining a debate between Pashinyan and Ter-Petrosyan ‘carries the risk of further damaging the mental state of the country’s leader and posing serious threats to Armenia's security’.
In turn, representatives for the other two ex-presidents issued their own responses, also accusing Pashinyan of being mentally unstable or an alcoholic. Such accusations are common among the opposition due to Pashinyan’s hot temper and frequent public outbursts.
‘During the season of homemade vodka, its excessive consumption aggravates mental health issues’, Bagrat Mikoyan, Kocharyan’s head of the office, told News.am on Tuesday.
Separately, the office of Serzh Sargsyan responded by quoting Mark Twain and Albert Einstein: ‘Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience’, and ‘Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the first’.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
