Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has confirmed he ‘instructed’ the director of the Armenian Genocide Memorial to resign after she had given US Vice President JD Vance a book on the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict.

In a press briefing on Thursday, Pashinyan accused Edita Gzoyan, the director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, of going against his government’s foreign policy by giving Vance the book.

He reiterated that he believed that the Armenian government ‘should not continue’ the Karabakh Movement — a mass national movement which began in the 1980s to call on the Soviet authorities to transfer the majority-Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia.

‘Giving a foreign guest a book about the Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] issue, what does that mean?’ Pashinyan asked, further calling the action ‘provocative’ and ‘contradicting’ his government’s foreign policy.

‘In this country, how many people are capable of conducting foreign policy? […] Any state official in Armenia who makes a statement that contradicts the foreign policy pursued by the government should be dismissed from their position. What is there to discuss?’ Pashinyan continued.

He further stated that Armenia is a state, not ‘some kind of amateur club’.

Reports suggesting that Gzoyan was pressured to resign surfaced since early March, with the tabloid Hraparak reporting that the Education Ministry justified the move by claiming that Gzoyan ‘had not properly supervised’ ongoing renovations at the Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex.

The outlet at the same time underscored that the supervision of the restoration ‘does not fall within [Gzoyan’s] official responsibilities’.

Instead, media reports suggested that Gzoyan was dismissed after speaking with Vance about the massacres of Armenians in Azerbaijan at the at the onset of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the 1980 in February during his visit to Yerevan and the Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex. She gave Vance the book during his visit to the memorial.

The Armenian Genocide Memorial complex also houses several monuments commemorating the victims of the massacres, which Gzoyan says she had shown Vance to emphasise ‘the connection between what happened and the Armenian Genocide’.

The Armenian authorities remain cautious in their official rhetoric about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as they navigate the ongoing normalisation process with Azerbaijan.

Pashinyan appeared to hint at his displeasure with Gzoyan’s action during an earlier parliamentary session, saying that ‘things have happened that would have been better if they hadn’t happened’.