Armenian Church Ready for New Clashes with PM Pashinyan

By Benoit Lannoo*

ANTWERP, Belgium | 23 July 2026 (IDN) — It was a remarkable meeting at the Vardavar celebration – the 14th Sunday after Easter – in Etchmiadzin. Armenian Apostolic Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan was blessed by Catholicos Garegin II in the mother-cathedral of this autocephalous (independent) Eastern Church. ‘Blessing with lots of water’ plays a central role on Vardavar.

This encounter was striking since the primate of Tavush is under house arrest. Bagrat was arrested a year ago on charges of planning a coup, and he was released from a prison in the centre of Yerevan just before the Armenian parliamentary elections of Sunday, 7 June. But Bagrat is apparently allowed to attend the liturgy, and he took advantage of this to go to the patriarchal mother-church and to be openly blessed by his Catholicos.

In doing so, both prelates subtly make it clear that they remain allies in their opposition to the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his U-turn concerning the former Armenian enclave of Artsakh. That enclave – also known by its Russian name Nagorno-Karabakh – was ‘cleansed’ of its more than one hundred thousand Armenian residents by Azerbaijan in the autumn of 2023. Pashinyan, however, prefers not to talk about it anymore. Pashinyan won the elections and his renewed government recently formally approved the peace agreement he signed with Azerbaijan in August last year. That agreement also provides for Armenia to amend the constitution, because it still contains an indirect reference to the reunification of the motherland with Nagorno-Karabakh.

But Pashinyan’s electoral Civil Contract alliance has no constitutional majority. The question is whether Pashinyan will succeed in completely wiping the Artsakh issue off the agenda in the coming months. He is not exactly helped by his former opponent and new partner, Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan. Aliyev is not the man to settle for a resounding victory. His adversaries must be humiliated, and new conditions added to every ceasefire or peace agreement. A few days ago, Aliyev publicly declared that the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh was justified, criticised the European and international bodies that defend the right to self-determination of the Artsakhians and – oh irony! – added that the South Caucasus should be governed by… international law.

Aliyev, however, does not care about any international law. In Artsakh’s capital Stepanakert, the Azeri’s just before the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide destroyed the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral entirely. Aliyev also consistently calls Armenia ‘West Azerbaijan,’ not hiding new territorial expansion claims. Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani strongman turns his back on anyone who stands in his way: he explicitly left the Council of Europe and do not want to deal anymore with the European Parliament, because both institutions are insisting on international law and the rights of the Artsakhians. But meanwhile, Aliyev has become one of Europe’s most prominent suppliers of gas and oil – or is it still Russian gas oil with a new label on it?

That is why Commission President Ursula von der Leyen continues to pamper the Azerbaijanis. Last Week, it became clear once again that the European Parliament is not happy with Von der Leyen’s politics in the South Caucasus. At a conference about some twenty former politicians and military leaders from Artsakh, who were sentenced to heavy prison terms in Baku in mock trials, and whose release is demanded by the European Parliament in an almost unanimously adopted motion, it appeared that the European Union can no longer maintain its stance on this matter. The European elected representatives are asking to support Artsakh, but the European Commission and the member states united in the European Council are reluctant to do so.

Meanwhile, the Armenian Apostolic Church has gone through its deepest crisis since the end of the Soviet Union. Last summer, Prime Minister Pashinyan started a smear campaign against the Catholicos of All Armenians through his Facebook account. The prime minister and his wife openly accused the supreme leader of the Church of not taking celibacy too seriously and even having fathered a child. On several occasions, he also explicitly called on the faithful to go to the Veharan – the residence of the Catholicos in Etchmiadzin, about thirty kilometres west of the capital Yerevan – to depose the Catholicos, a declaration that each time caused a lot of commotion there.

Armenians in Armenia and in the diaspora repeatedly ask me: ‘Why is Pashinyan attacking the Catholicos only since last Summer? He has been Armenia’s strongman since 2018, so why did he never make those accusations earlier?’ Rumours about the ‘Catholicos of all Armenians’ are not new; just about every observer says that there have been complaints behind the scenes for years about the luxurious lifestyle of Ktritsch Nersissian (Prime Minister Pashinyan since last Summer invariably calls the patriarch by his baptismal name), about his authoritarian Church government, and even about the vow of celibacy that he would not respect. The answer to the question ‘why now?’ is not ecclesiastical at all, but pure political; and it has a lot to do with Artsakh.

Someone who made the effort to look at the complex situation in the Southern Caucasus from all angles is the Lebanese-born journalist and researcher Vicken Cheterian. This lector in international relations in Geneva has coordinated the publication The 44-Day War: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the struggle for Nagorno-Karabakh. In that book from 2025, several scholars look back from both Armenian and Azerbaijani angles on the 44-Day War of 2020, when Azerbaijan, with the explicit support of Turkey and with Israeli drones, managed to recapture all buffer areas around the enclave of Artsakh from the Armenians who had gained them after the bloody first war for Nagorno-Karabakh (1988-1994).

Some argue that Pashinyan unintentionally provoked that 44-Day War by stating with fanfare during a military parade in Shushi in May 2020 – in the middle of the enclave – that ‘Karabakh is Armenian; period!’ In doing so, he ignored how much Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had not only fuelled anti-Armenian hatred in his country, but in the meantime also had heavily weaponized his military. Yerevan apparently had not understood that the Armenians would stand alone if Baku attacked again. Indeed, when the Azeris advanced on Stepanakert and Shushi in September 2020, no other country was ready to properly defend the Artsakhians. The European Union, for example, was overflowing with large and senseless declarations and no action at all.

Russian President Vladimir Putin forced both sides into a ceasefire on 10 November 2020. When I drove past the road to Shushi a few days later, a Turkish flag was flying unabashedly next to an Azerbaijani flag. Pashinyan misjudged the situation once again. As so-called environmentalists blocked the only corridor to what remained of Artsakh in December 2022, the Russian peacekeepers did not intervene. Nor did they when Azerbaijan attacked again in September 2023 and the hundred thousand remaining Artsakhians fled the enclave within Azerbaijan’s borders to the Armenian motherland. Only then did Pashinyan understand: Nagorno-Karabakh has been lost, and he no longer had any ally to count on!

That is why Prime Minister Pashinyan made his U-turn: he resigned himself to the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and tried to normalize relations with former enemies Azerbaijan and Türkiye. But the Armenian Apostolic Church rejected this U-turn. ‘Before, the Church was always loyal to those who call the shots in Yerevan,’ Cheterian explains. Catholicos Garegin I (1983-1995) did not interfere with the politics of President Levon Ter-Petrossian (1991-1998), nor with those of his successors Robert Kotcharian (1998-2008) and Serzh Sarksyan (2008-2018). Even after his Velvet Revolution of 2018 and after his first re-election in 2021, the relationship of Armenia’s new Prime Minister, former journalist Nikol Pashinyan, with Catholicos Garegin II at first remained cordial.

However secularized the former Soviet republic may be, the Armenian Apostolic Church is the linchpin of the Armenian identity. People with money support her. Philanthropists, for example, have funded the construction of the gigantic cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, which was inaugurated in Yerevan in 2001 to celebrate 1700 years of Christianity in the country. Women invariably wear a cross on a necklace; men have Christian symbols tattooed on their arms. The Metz Yeghern – ‘Great Crime’ – also plays a key role within this national narrative. During the Armenian genocide of 1915, the government of the Young Turks in Istanbul killed one and a half million Armenians and systematically wiped out the Armenian identity of western Armenia.

There are no Armenians anymore in Eastern Anatolia and any remaining churches or monasteries are now in ruins, like those of the city of Ani, where Turkish tourist guides do not even dare to admit that it is Armenian heritage. The Azerbaijani regime, under the father Heydar and the son Ilham Aliyev, has done the same in the Nakhichevan exclave southeast of Armenia and is currently doing it again in Artsakh. Several churches are already destroyed, graveyards have been desacralized, and hundreds of khachkars (carved memorial steles bearing a cross, characteristic of medieval Christian Armenian art) have disappeared. Aliyev takes his time, but no doubt that the Armenian heritage of Artsakh will be erased from memory as it has been done before in Anatolia and in Nakhichevan.

Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, the primate of the northern diocese of Tavush, has always been revolting most strongly against Pashinyan’s political turn. ‘Artsakh is ours,’ he told me explicitly when I met him in November 2023, before his arrest. ‘It is in the monasteries of Artsakh that Armenian Christianity and even our language and our alphabet were conceived. You cannot separate the loss of Artsakh from the broader Armenian question, from the Armenian Genocide and from the attacks and the negationism of Türkiye and Azerbaijan.’ In May 2024, Galstanyan organised ‘Tavush for the Homeland’, a protest march on Yerevan, and he called for Prime Minister Pashinyan to be removed from power.

That is not to say that the Catholicos himself sided with the opposition. Strategically, Garegin II is keeping a low profile on narrowly political issues. But everyone knows that Etchmiadzin is very sympathetic to Galstanyan’s analysis. There were even whispers that Galstanyan could be a viable candidate for the premiership. Cheterian, however, stresses the pointlessness of Galstanyan’s movement. ‘It is inconceivable that Baku will leave Nagorno-Karabakh, certainly not in the near future. Who would encourage President Aliyev to do so? Not the Russians, not the Europeans, and not the Americans, because since the war in Ukraine, they all prefer to keep oil and gas-rich Azerbaijan as friendly as possible.’

Pashinyan, Aliyev and ‘peace broker’ Donald J. Trump in Washington on 8 August last year signed a memorandum of understanding. This was never a peace agreement! It is a business deal that gives in to all Azerbaijan’s aggression in recent years in exchange for a lucrative trade corridor through the southern Armenian province of Syunik – the memorandum of understanding text does not even have the courtesy of giving that corridor an Armenian name but already uses the Azerbaijani name for the province in question, Zangezur. It also does not mention Artsakh, nor the hundred thousand Artsakhians on the run, nor the Artsakhian political prisoners in Baku, nor the Armenian cultural-religious heritage that the Azeris are already destroying…

Analyst Cheterian does not think it is possible to go back on the Washington agreement. Pashinyan’s U-turn might not be liked by the Church, the Armenian diaspora in Europe and the United States, nor the political opposition in the homeland; that opposition is hopelessly divided. Meanwhile, Pashinyan has been playing it hard: anyone who criticises his policy is taken before the courts for alleged crimes. Armenia’s richest man and important philanthropist of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Samvel Karapetyan, has been in jail since last Summer. Following the election, his ‘Strong Armenia’ alliance became the largest opposition force in the National Assembly, but only half as big as Pashinyan’s Civil Contract.

‘In 2018 Pashinyan had promised to tackle corruption in the country and to reform its governance in a transparent, democratic way,’ Cheterian points out. ‘He didn’t keep any of those promises.’ On the contrary, the Prime Minister has become an autocratic leader abusing all institutions for his personal ambitions, just like Soviet leaders did at their time and Armenian politicians have done since independence.’ Three Archbishops were put behind bars: Bagrat Galstanyan of Tavush, Mikael Ajapahjan of Shirak, and Mkrtich Proshan of Aragatsotn, as are other Church leaders, priests and opposition leaders. Experts from the United Nations, meanwhile, are challenging Armenia’s prosecution over terrorism charges against Archbishop Galstanyan.

At the end of November last year, ten prelates shocked observers as they sat around the table with Pashinyan and… joined his calls for the Catholicos to step aside. Among them were archbishops of dioceses in the motherland, such as Sion Adamyan of Armavir, Arakel Karamyan of Kotayk, and Abraham Mkrtchjan of Vayots Dzor. They were joined by bishops from the diaspora, like Vazgen Mizakhanyan of the diocese in the Baltic States, or Hovnan Derderian of the diocese in the western United States. But during a remarkable meeting in the Austrian abbey of Sankt Pölten last February, Archbishop Derderian, considered one of the leading figures of the dissidence, signed an appeal for unity in the Armenian Apostolic Church and confirmed his loyalty to the katholikos.

The most surprising element of the crisis was that Archbishop Vrtanes Abrahamyan of the diocese of Artsakh – the diocese in exile – was also among the dissidents opposing the katholikos. His participation to the movement showed that it obviously was no longer just about Artsakh. What, then, was it about? It is true that each of the ten dissidents was rumoured to nurse personal ambitions, to have fallen victim to corruption or to be involved in private business deals. They did not form a solid, united front. However, many observers think that the ‘dissidents’ had had enough of the pro-Russian position of the leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church. (Now that the dissidence has disappeared, Archbishop Abrahamyan of Artsakh seems to suffer from a serious burnout.)

Pashinyan & Co. indeed have realized that Armenia can expect little from its historical allies in Moscow, and therefore better turn towards Washington and seek a normalization of relations with Baku and Ankara. ‘There is a lot to be said for that,’ Cheterian remarks, ‘if you want effectively to prevent new violence in the Southern Caucasus.’ After all, the Azerbaijani President Aliyev will not need much justification to attack again. That is why it is so dangerous to cherish Aliyev without holding him accountable for what he is doing in Nagorno-Karabakh or with the Artsakhian political hostages held in prison in Baku. Was there ever before in history a peace agreement without releasing prisoners before the agreement?’

Unfortunately, the Churches also are cherishing Aliyev. Pope Leo XIV received the Armenian Apostolic Catholicos Aram I of Cilicia in mid-May. Publicly, the emphasis was on the situation in Lebanon, where many of Aram’s believers live. However, it is obvious that the developments around Artsakh were also discussed during the conversation. But at the same time, the Vatican continues to carefully maintain relations with Azerbaijan. The financial support of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation to Vatican projects might play a key role in the good relationship between Rome and Baku. The Heydar Aliyev Foundation richly finances the Vatican Museums and other cultural projects in Catholic Rome. Can the ‘first diplomacy’ in the world continue to be led by Mammon?

*Benoit Lannoo is Church historian and expert in Eastern Oriental Churches.

https://indepthnews.net/armenian-church-ready-for-new-clashes-with-pm-pashinyan/