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Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is totally intolerant of anyone who disagrees with him, even though he repeatedly portrays himself as a staunch defender of democracy.
In addition to violating hundreds of laws, including numerous provisions of the Constitution, Pashinyan has directed security officers to arrest those who criticize him on Facebook. Foreigners who post similar comments from overseas may be placed on the government’s blacklist, and barred from entering Armenia, or arrested upon arrival.
This is what happened to Anush Hadjyan, who lives in the Los Angeles area. She is a citizen of the United States, not Armenia. On April 24, 2025, Anush shared someone else’s message criticizing Pashinyan on her Facebook page and added a few words of her own: “Finish off the Turkish puppet of the Nikol clan.”
Anush’s harsh words were an emotional outburst in reaction to Pashinyan’s questioning of the facts of the Armenian Genocide. However, it is much more reprehensible for the prime minister himself to use such vile and violent language against his political opponents. Yet no judge in Armenia dares to hold him accountable for his own transgressions.
More than a year later, on June 13, 2026, Anush was detained at Yerevan airport without explanation after traveling to Armenia. She was taken to a police station in the city and held there for eight hours before being released pending trial. In the meantime, she was prohibited from leaving the country.
As a U.S. citizen, Anush contacted the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan for assistance. An embassy employee said all she could offer was a list of local attorneys. In my view, the employee failed to provide adequate help. The embassy should have checked on Anush’s welfare and sought to ensure that her rights as a U.S. citizen were protected.
Anush hired a local attorney on her own and appeared in court almost two months later. She was pressured to admit guilt for her 2025 Facebook post, and her attorney advised her to comply. She was fined the equivalent of $2,000 and also paid thousands of dollars in attorney fees.
Anush paid the fine the same day, received a receipt, and was told she was now free to travel. However, when she attempted to drive to Georgia, she was stopped by Armenia’s border guards and prevented from proceeding, even after showing her court-issued release certificate. After two hours of detention at a local police station, she was finally allowed to cross into Georgia.
What is truly astonishing is that government officials appear to monitor the Facebook pages of countless Armenians, in Armenia and throughout the Diaspora, searching for comments critical of Pashinyan in order to prosecute those who post them. One would think the government has more urgent matters to deal with than monitoring people’s Facebook pages.
Anush is fortunate not to have been jailed. Many others have been arrested over Facebook posts. Here are some examples:
Artur Danielyan, a well-known Pashinyan critic, was arrested last week, just hours after calling him “scum” on Facebook.
Playwright Vahram Sahakyan was arrested on September 29 on charges of inciting “hatred, intolerance and hostility” over a Facebook post he published in January 2025. He was placed under administrative supervision and released on the condition that he refrain from posting on Facebook.
Artak Avetisyan was acquitted last month after being arrested in May. The initial “hate speech” allegation was later replaced with a charge of serious “hooliganism.” He had lashed out at Pashinyan on Facebook during the parliamentary election campaign.
In February, another critic was arrested and charged with hooliganism, two months after posting an offensive video about Pashinyan on TikTok. Around the same time, a 55-year-old woman from Akhuryan was prosecuted for reportedly making disparaging remarks about the prime minister and his family in a private online message.
Armenian lawyer Aleksandr Kochubayev was detained in 2025 after publishing a social media post criticizing law enforcement and judicial officials. Gayane Mesropyan from Artsakh was arrested in March 2026 over a Facebook post criticizing Pashinyan. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 posts containing vile comments directed at Artsakh Armenians went uninvestigated by the authorities.
On October 1, outspoken Armenian opposition parliamentarian Edgar Ghazaryan received a suspended two-year prison sentence for strongly criticizing a Constitutional Court ruling issued two years earlier. A Yerevan court convicted him of spreading “defamatory information” about the justices. His sister, Lilit Ghazaryan, was forced by her boss to resign after 22 years as deputy head of the government’s drug regulatory agency.
Even academics have lost their jobs for criticizing Pashinyan. Ruben Melikyan, a prominent pro-opposition lawyer who had taught law for 23 years at Yerevan State University (YSU), was fired in July. Two other YSU lecturers who supported the opposition, Alen Ghulyan and Shushan Vardanyan, were also dismissed that month.
However, Pashinyan’s supporters enjoy protection from prosecution. Earlier this year, one man told the media that Catholicos Karekin II should be “hit on the head with a stone and killed.” No charges were filed against him.
In 2023, then-Speaker of Parliament Alen Simonyan spat in the face of a Canadian-Armenian critic in Yerevan. Yet, the police detained the victim, not Simonyan.
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2- FBI Director Kash Patel engaged to an Armenian woman
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Hanning is also known to have maintained connections with Azerbaijan. He previously served on the board of the German-Azerbaijani Forum, an organization promoting relations between the two countries.
German authorities arrested both Hanning and Manfred D. on October 6. Prosecutors are investigating Hanning on suspicion of treasonous espionage, obtaining state secrets, attempted treason and acting as an agent for a foreign intelligence service.
German prosecutors have not officially identified Azerbaijan as the foreign state involved. The reported Azerbaijani connection is based on information attributed to investigators by Der Spiegel.
4- Production starts in Azerbaijan’s first Israeli weapons factory
It is the country’s first facility to produce Western-style, M-4 type rifles.
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Aliyev’s Rhetoric of Armenia as ‘West Azerbaijan’ Suggests Peace Is Not His Goal and He Is PlayingMichael RubinMiddle East ForumPresident Donald Trump believes he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. He has engaged in Gaza, Iran, and claimed to have ended a “thousand-year-old dispute” between India and Pakistan, never mind that the partition of India is less than 80 years old. He also claimed peace between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Gaza, however, Hamas continues to refuse to disarm. So, too, does Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Iran Memorandum of Understanding did not last ten days and Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi appears more interested in selling his sovereignty to China, in exchange for an unconstitutional third, than abiding by his commitments to Trump and to rein in the terror groups that sent stability in the region into a free fall.“Armenia and Azerbaijan are committing to stop all fighting forever, open up commerce, travel and diplomatic relations, and respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”President Donald TrumpNow, it appears the crown jewel of Trump peace-making—the agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia—is on the verge of collapse. On August 8, 2025, Trump hosted Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the White House. The leaders signed a joint declaration that purported to end decades of fighting. “We’ve finally succeeded in making peace,” Trump said. “Armenia and Azerbaijan are committing to stop all fighting forever, open up commerce, travel and diplomatic relations, and respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”Following the ceasefire, Trump co-opted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “corridor” proposal, recasting it as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), a U.S.-administered transportation corridor to link Turkey and the Azerbaijani exclave Nakhichevan to Azerbaijan proper through Armenia.The Trump administration’s conception of the corridor was always flawed for two reasons. First, if Turkey and Azerbaijan would lift their blockade of Armenia, there would be no need for a corridor. Second, Azerbaijan partners with Iran by choice, rather than necessity; in 2022, it launched a corridor across Iranian territory.While Pashinyan doubles down on the peace agreement with Azerbaijan, arguing that Armenia has no other choice given Azerbaijan’s victory in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, his critics have always raised concerns about Aliyev’s sincerity. Azerbaijani demands increase in proportion to Armenian concessions. Increasingly, these stray into the realm of ridiculousness. Mount Ararat has been the symbol of Armenia since before the Armenian genocide and, on a clear day, it forms the backdrop to Yerevan, yet Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan demand and Pashinyan agrees to erase Ararat in Armenian symbolism since it now lies in Turkey.Aliyev signals that, Pashinyan’s compromises notwithstanding, reconciliation is not on Azerbaijan’s agenda. Speaking on October 2, 2026, at the congress of his political party, Aliyev declared, “It is true that the former leaders of Armenia are war criminals and should bear their punishment, but it was the current Armenian authorities that made territorial demands on us, insulted the dignity of the Azerbaijani people with inappropriate and uncivilized statements. In short, we must never forget about it.”The greatest impediment to successful peacemaking across administrations is a failure of the White House and the State Department to understand the importance of ideology. Diplomats take comfort in the idea that ordinary grievances lie at the heart of all conflicts. To make peace in such circumstances requires finding the right magic formula of concessions and trade-offs. When ideology governs decision-making, though, economic betterment no longer serves as a motive for agreement. When the ideology involves religion, the State Department is especially blind. Because the United States separates church and state, too many diplomats treat religion as a third rail. Others recognize the importance of faith but internalize a sanitized understanding due to studies at universities like Georgetown University that allow Qatari donations to shape curriculum.Ignorance of history also matters. When diplomats rotate in and out of files every two or three years, they eventually lose sight of the origins of disputes or past promises. Nine different U.S. ambassadors served in Baku since Aliyev came to power, without even counting the various charges d’affaires, some of whom served as long as formal ambassadors.Aliyev will use negotiations to extract concessions but then simply walk away from the table to resume his goal of eradicating an entity whose existence he can never accept.As a result, those managing the South Caucasus file under both the Biden and Trump administrations fail to understand the root causes of conflict and fail also to differentiate between real atrocities—the pogrom in Baku, for example—and largely fake atrocities, such as the so-called Khojaly genocide. They also misunderstand the constitutional issues at the heart of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.What Aliyev’s statements illustrate, however, is that peace is not his goal. Like the late Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, Aliyev will use negotiations to extract concessions but then simply walk away from the table to resume his goal of eradicating an entity whose existence he can never accept. Indeed, while Trump points to peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia as an example of the art of the deal, Aliyev’s doubling down on the rhetoric of Armenia as West Azerbaijan suggests Aliyev sees Trump not as an ally, but as a fool over whom Aliyev can run roughshod.If Trump refuses to recognize that his peace is in jeopardy and if Pashinyan continues to govern like a gambler who believes just one more bet can absolve his diplomatic losing streak, then the true legacy of both leaders will be to preside over the end of Christianity in Armenia.
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