A Leader Desperate to Silence Criticism of His Catastrophic Failures
Why is Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attacking Armenia’s most trusted institution? Why has he arrested clergy, imprisoned philanthropists, and violated constitutional protections that have stood for decades? The answer lies in his desperate attempt to silence legitimate criticism of the most catastrophic failure in modern Armenian history: the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Armenian Christians.
Pashinyan cannot tolerate the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church because the Church dares to speak the truth he wants buried. As the constitutional guardian of Armenian national culture and identity, the Church has defended the rights of displaced Armenians and condemned the destruction of their ancient heritage. For a leader whose approval rating has plummeted to just 13%, eliminating this voice of accountability has become a matter of political survival.
“A National Catastrophe”
Vartan Oskanian, Armenia’s former foreign minister, captured the magnitude of Pashinyan’s failures: “Nikol Pashinyan’s tenure as Armenia’s leader has been nothing short of a national catastrophe. Over six years, his reckless incompetence and political short-sightedness have turned a proud nation into a humiliated shadow of itself.”
The numbers tell a devastating story. Between 2020 and 2023, Armenia suffered its most crushing defeats since independence. In the 2020 war with Azerbaijan, as many as 7,000 were killed in action on all sides, 170 civilians died, and some 130,000 were displaced from their homes. Azerbaijan recaptured territory lost in the First Karabakh War and seized roughly a third of Armenian-inhabited Karabakh. Then, in September 2023, came the final blow: a 24-hour Azerbaijani offensive that triggered the exodus of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians—an act international organizations, including the European Parliament and Freedom House, confirmed as ethnic cleansing.
For Armenians, Karabakh is the last outpost of their Christian civilisation and a historic haven of Armenian princes and bishops.”
– Thomas de Waal, renowned historian on the Caucasus
Recklessness and Arrogance
How did this catastrophe unfold? Through a toxic combination of recklessness, messianic arrogance, and strategic incompetence that experts have documented in devastating detail.
Armen Grigoryan, a leading regional expert, identifies a pattern inherent to revolutionary leaders like Pashinyan: “Successful revolutionary leaders become overconfident in their views and decisions. They often become cult figures in the eyes of their followers and begin to believe in their messianic missions and mystical abilities.” Pashinyan exemplified this dangerous mindset when he declared during a 2019 rally: “Realistic plans are not interesting to us anymore. That, which is possible to accomplish is not interesting to us. We are only interested in accomplishing things that everybody thinks are impossible to accomplish.”
This wasn’t inspirational leadership—it was reckless bravado that ignored geopolitical realities and military preparedness. Grigoryan documents the consequences: “The available evidence reveals Pashinyan’s propensity to tolerate extreme risks. He ignored the warnings about a looming war with possible Turkish involvement and transparent signals that Russia might not come to the rescue.”
Even more damningly, after his general staff informed him on the third day of the 2020 war that continuing the fight was futile, Pashinyan stubbornly refused to sue for peace, needlessly extending the bloodshed.
Perhaps most damaging was Pashinyan’s own admission in 2025 that he had rejected a 2019 peace plan presented by international mediators—a plan that upheld Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination. For years he denied such a plan existed. When he finally admitted seeing and rejecting it, the revelation confirmed what critics suspected: Pashinyan had ignored a potential path to peace, making him directly responsible for the ensuing war and ethnic cleansing.
The Church Speaks Truth to Power
Enter the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church. In fulfilling its constitutional mandate to preserve Armenian national culture and identity, the Church could not remain silent about the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh.
In December 2020, following Armenia’s defeat, Catholicos Karekin II recognized the “hard days of pain, distress, and anxiety we are living through, after confronting the horrors of war.” He described the territorial losses as “catastrophic consequences of the war, which have left our souls shaken, and undermined solidarity and national unity—in the homeland and the diaspora.” Noting the diminished public confidence in the Prime Minister, the Catholicos urged Pashinyan “to step down as Prime Minister to prevent further disruptions, possible clashes, and tragic consequences in public life.”
This wasn’t revolutionary agitation—it was the measured voice of a spiritual leader calling for political accountability in a moment of national crisis. The Catholicos explicitly emphasized that the Church supported no political party but was “guided by solely national and state interests.”
After the 2023 ethnic cleansing, the Church’s Supreme Spiritual Council declared that “the aggressive, genocidal actions of Azerbaijan, the policy adopted by the authorities of the Republic of Armenia towards Artsakh and the divisiveness of our people led to the loss of Artsakh.” The Church continued defending the religious and cultural heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh even as Azerbaijan systematically destroyed Armenian churches and monuments—destruction the European Centre for Law & Justice characterized as “cultural genocide.”
In May 2025, when Catholicos Karekin II addressed the World Council of Churches conference in Bern, he spoke truth about “the continued barbaric destruction of ancient Armenian monuments, Christian holy sites, settlements, and cemeteries,” warning that “the impunity of such barbaric crimes fosters a climate of lawlessness.”
These statements—factual, measured, and rooted in the Church’s constitutional duty—signed the Catholicos’s death warrant in Pashinyan’s eyes. Unable to defend his record, Pashinyan chose to destroy the messenger.
“Real Armenia”: Rewriting History to Escape Accountability
Pashinyan’s response to criticism has been to double down on historical revisionism through his “Real Armenia” project, launched in January 2025. This ideological campaign seeks to restrict Armenia’s national identity to its current geographic boundaries, thereby delegitimizing the importance of Nagorno-Karabakh to the Armenian people. As independent media observed, it’s “a textbook post-truth tactic: acknowledging facts in a narrow sense while altering their meaning for the public.”
The same Prime Minister who once declared “Artsakh is Armenia, the end” now claims “we should not continue the Karabakh movement,” arguing it contributed to “the failure of Armenia’s statehood.” This Orwellian reversal aims to rewrite history and absolve himself of responsibility. Critics rightly observe that the “Real Armenia” project’s true goal “is to rewrite history in such a way as to absolve himself of criticism of the way he lost the country’s war with Azerbaijan in 2020.”
The Church, as guardian of Armenian historical memory and national culture, stands in direct opposition to this revisionist project. A 2024 poll revealed that 87.5% of Armenians agree that “the loss of Artsakh is temporary, we must strengthen our army and bring back what was lost.” The Church gives voice to this majority view—which is precisely why Pashinyan must silence it.
The Stakes for Armenia’s Future
The persecution of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church is not a religious dispute or a personal vendetta—it is a authoritarian leader’s desperate attempt to eliminate the last credible voice capable of holding him accountable for national catastrophe. By attacking the Church, imprisoning its supporters like Samvel Karapetyan, and attempting to overthrow Catholicos Karekin II, Pashinyan reveals the depths of his political desperation ahead of June 2026 parliamentary elections.
The international community must recognize this persecution for what it is: the actions of a failed leader who has presided over the ethnic cleansing of 100,000 Christians, the destruction of ancient churches and monasteries, and the humiliation of a proud nation—and who now seeks to silence anyone who dares speak this truth.
As Alison Meuse, an experienced journalist and regional expert, observed: “The Church has not faced such an existential threat since the harshest years of the Soviet purges and consolidation of power.” History is repeating itself—but this time, the perpetrator is not a foreign oppressor but Armenia’s own government.
The Armenian people deserve a leader who accepts accountability, not one who persecutes those who demand it. They deserve protection for their religious institutions, not attacks on their most sacred traditions. And they deserve the truth about Nagorno-Karabakh—not a manufactured history designed to absolve a leader whose failures will echo through generations.
The world must stand with the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church. The alternative is to enable the silencing of truth and the consolidation of authoritarian rule in the world’s first Christian nation.
