The historical truth did not change. Israel’s geopolitical environment did.
Syriana Analysis
For decades, Israel refused to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide despite overwhelming historical evidence and even though many Jewish historians acknowledged it without hesitation. Successive Israeli governments insisted that the issue was too politically sensitive, too strategically costly, or simply too complicated to address. And yet, almost overnight, that position appears to have changed. Not because new archives were opened, not because historians discovered new evidence, and certainly not because the victims of 1915 suddenly became more deserving of justice than they were yesterday. The historical facts remained exactly the same. The only thing that changed was the geopolitical environment.
I believe this detail is far more important than the recognition itself because it tells us something uncomfortable about how states weaponize history. As a descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors, I have spent my entire life believing that historical recognition matters. Not because parliamentary resolutions can undo what happened to my ancestors, nor because official declarations can bring back those who were murdered or driven from their homeland, but because historical truth matters in its own right. A crime of that magnitude should never depend on diplomatic convenience, nor should its acknowledgment fluctuate according to changing alliances, arms deals, or regional rivalries. That is precisely why I find it difficult to celebrate Israel’s announcement without first understanding the political calculations that produced it.
When governments that spent decades resisting historical recognition suddenly change course, the first question should be: why did they decide that recognition had become politically useful now?
The timing becomes even more striking when one remembers Netanyahu’s own response during his interview with Patrick Bet-David. Asked directly whether Israel recognized the Armenian Genocide, Netanyahu did not offer a clear answer. Instead, he relied on ambiguity, suggesting that he had somehow answered the question without actually committing himself or his government to an official position. It was a remarkably careful performance, and I think it reflected the reality that, until very recently, recognizing the Armenian Genocide simply did not serve Israel’s strategic interests.
Then came Gideon Sa’ar’s announcement. The Israeli cabinet unanimously endorsed a proposal to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide, although the measure still requires approval by the Knesset before becoming formal state policy. This distinction matters, especially because the Knesset is approaching dissolution. Israel has already obtained the diplomatic headlines and the political signaling associated with recognition while leaving open the possibility that the legislation itself may never become law if political circumstances change.
Sa’ar can now wear the statesman’s hat without necessarily carrying the burden of a final recognition that could complicate Israel’s future relationship with Turkey. If the Knesset dissolves, the proposal can be inherited, delayed or quietly abandoned by another government. If it passes, the next government carries the diplomatic consequences. Either way, the announcement itself may be more valuable to Israel than the legislation it supposedly initiates.That alone should invite skepticism. If historical justice were truly the driving force behind this decision, why did it take 80 years to arrive? Why now, at a moment when relations with Turkey have deteriorated to unprecedented levels? Why now, when Israel faces one of the deepest diplomatic crises in its modern history and is itself accused before international courts of committing genocide in Gaza? These are not separate questions. In my view, they are different parts of the same geopolitical picture.
For decades, Israel’s position on the Armenian Genocide was determined by strategic priorities. During the 1990s and much of the 2000s, Turkey was arguably Israel’s most important regional partner. Military cooperation expanded rapidly, intelligence agencies worked closely together, Israeli defense companies modernized Turkish military equipment, and joint exercises became routine. Ankara gave Israel political access and strategic leverage inside a predominantly Muslim region, while Israel supplied Turkey with advanced military technology, intelligence cooperation and diplomatic support. Under those circumstances, successive Israeli governments concluded that recognizing the Armenian Genocide would unnecessarily damage one of their most valuable strategic relationships.
That calculation extended far beyond Jerusalem. Inside Washington, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Israeli lobbying organizations repeatedly found themselves working in the same direction against congressional recognition of the Armenian Genocide. AIPAC, the ADL and other influential pro-Israel organizations helped create political pressure against recognition during a period when Israel’s relationship with Turkey was considered strategically indispensable. This history is well documented, but it is rarely discussed today because it undermines the narrative that Israel was merely neutral on the question of Armenian recognition. It was not neutral. Israel did not simply refrain from recognizing the Armenian Genocide. It used its influence, directly or indirectly, to help prevent others from recognizing it as well.
This is why the present move cannot be separated from the collapse of the Israel-Turkey relationship. As Haaretz itself put it, this may be the right move for the wrong reasons. Recognition comes at a moment when Turkey is no longer the strategic asset it once was and has increasingly become a regional rival. The same genocide that was once too sensitive to mention has now become politically useful because it can be used as leverage against Ankara. Armenian historical memory is being brought back into the conversation not because the Israeli government suddenly discovered a conscience, but because it seeks to weaponize it.
There is also another dimension that deserves more attention. Israel’s recognition proposal arrives at a moment when the word genocide has become central to the international debate around Gaza. For perhaps the first time in its modern history, Israel is no longer only invoking the memory of genocide. It is being accused of committing one. This changes the political importance of historical memory itself. Once the accusation of genocide becomes part of the global debate, controlling the definition of genocide becomes almost as important as defending military operations on the ground. Israeli officials and many of their supporters increasingly present genocide as something that can only exist when millions are murdered, when industrial extermination is present, or when a crime resembles the Holocaust in its exact form. But genocide is not defined by a numerical threshold. The legal question is whether there is intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part.
This is why I find it impossible to separate Israel’s proposed recognition from the broader struggle over political narratives. By recognizing the Armenian Genocide today, Israel can present itself as a defender of historical justice and moral memory while simultaneously contesting the legal and moral framework increasingly being applied to its own actions in Gaza. It can say to the world: we know what genocide is, we recognize genocide, we condemn denial. But the real question is not whether Israel can recognize a genocide that happened more than a century ago. The real question is whether it accepts the same legal and moral principles when they are applied to the Palestinians and Lebanese today.
This is narrative warfare, and narrative warfare has become one of the defining characteristics of contemporary geopolitics.
The F-35 dimension makes this even clearer. According to the Haaretz analysis, the real audience for Israel’s recognition is not Yerevan, Ankara or Baku. It is Washington, and it is connected to the question of Turkey’s possible return to the F-35 program. Israel fears that a Turkish acquisition of the advanced stealth aircraft would threaten its regional aerial dominance and challenge Washington’s long-standing commitment to Israel’s qualitative military edge. At the same time, Trump has shown a clear willingness to praise Erdoğan, describe him as a strong NATO leader and signal that he may be prepared to provide Turkey with military hardware that would make Ankara “very happy.”
This is where the Armenian Genocide becomes useful again as a political pressure point inside Washington. It reminds American politicians of the issue Turkey fears most, precisely at a moment when Ankara is trying to repair its defense relationship with the United States and regain access to advanced military systems. Israel does not need to declare openly that it is using Armenian recognition to block or complicate an F-35 deal. The timing speaks for itself. The genocide becomes part of a wider proxy war between Israel and Turkey, with Washington as the decisive arena.
That does not mean Israel and Turkey are necessarily heading toward a direct military confrontation. I remain skeptical of that argument. Turkey is a NATO member, Israel understands Turkey’s military weight, and both states have repeatedly demonstrated that they know how to compete, coordinate and avoid crossing each other’s most dangerous red lines. They can clash politically, undermine each other through allies and compete for influence in Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Washington, while still avoiding a direct war. But that does not make the rivalry unreal. It simply means that the battlefield is not necessarily a conventional one. It can be fought through lobbying, military programs, diplomatic recognition, intelligence networks and the weaponization of historical memory.
This cynicism becomes even more striking when one examines Israel’s treatment of Armenians not in history, but in the present. The Armenian community in Jerusalem has struggled for years to defend one of Christianity’s oldest continuous communities against corporate projects and political interests that threaten its land and demographic future. The Armenian Quarter is not merely another neighborhood inside the Old City. It represents centuries of uninterrupted Armenian presence in Jerusalem, surviving empires, wars, occupations and political transformations. Yet today, its residents continue fighting legal battles and facing pressure to preserve land and property that have belonged to the Armenian Patriarchate for generations. The Save the ArQ movement exists because Armenians in Jerusalem understand that their community faces an existential challenge.
How can a government suddenly present itself as the defender of Armenian historical memory while Armenians living under its authority continue struggling to preserve their physical presence in Jerusalem? If Israel truly cares about Armenians and the Armenian Genocide, the least it can do is stop enabling policies and interests that may push one of the last remaining Armenian communities in the Middle East toward further displacement. Historical recognition becomes difficult to separate from political convenience when contemporary realities point in the opposite direction.
The contradiction extends far beyond Jerusalem. Over the past two decades, Israel has become one of Azerbaijan’s closest strategic partners. This relationship is not limited to trade or diplomacy. It rests upon intelligence cooperation, oil, military technology and the broader confrontation with Iran. Israeli defense companies supplied Azerbaijan with sophisticated drones, missile systems, loitering munitions, surveillance technologies and other advanced weapons that altered the military balance during the wars over Nagorno-Karabakh. These weapons were decisive instruments on the battlefield.
The consequences are well known. More than 120,000 Armenians were forced to flee Artsakh in 2023. Entire communities disappeared almost overnight from lands where Armenians had lived for centuries. Churches were emptied, villages were abandoned, cemeteries and cultural heritage sites were left behind, and an ancient population vanished from Nagorno-Karabakh. Throughout this period, Israel did not reconsider its strategic partnership with Baku. Military cooperation continued expanding because Azerbaijan was not only a lucrative arms market. It was a major oil supplier and a strategic platform on Iran’s northern frontier.
This is also why the Israeli involvement in so-called smart villages near the Iranian border deserves much more scrutiny. I am not making speculative claims about the precise functions of these projects or the intelligence activities that may or may not be connected to them. But the broader picture is clear enough: territories emptied of Armenians have become part of a new strategic geography in which Azerbaijan consolidates control, Israel expands technological and political influence, and Iran becomes the central target of concern. Armenia does not appear in this strategy primarily as a moral question. It appears as a variable inside the wider confrontation with Turkey, Iran and the changing balance of power across the South Caucasus.
This is why I struggle to interpret Israel’s new concern for Armenian historical suffering as evidence of moral consistency. If the descendants of genocide survivors deserve recognition for what happened in 1915, why did the descendants of those same survivors receive Israeli-made drones over their heads in 2020 and 2023? If Armenian memory genuinely deserves protection, why was that concern absent when an entire Armenian population was displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh under weapons supplied by one of Israel’s closest regional allies? Why was there no moral awakening then? Why was there no cabinet resolution, no solemn statement, no warning about historical responsibility?
Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide remains indefensible. Erdoğan’s attempt to portray Ottoman and Turkish history as a story of nothing but justice, mercy and compassion is not serious history. It is denial. Armenians were not deported from their homeland because they suddenly decided to move to the deserts of Deir ez-Zor. My own family was not born in Syria because they simply preferred Aleppo to eastern Anatolia. Churches, villages, cemeteries and cultural sites did not disappear by coincidence. The Armenian Genocide happened. It was organized, systematic and catastrophic, and those who deny it are denying a historical crime against humanity.
But Turkey’s denial does not transform Israel’s timing into an act of solidarity. Two governments can be cynical at the same time. One can deny the Armenian Genocide because it fears historical responsibility, while the other can invoke the Armenian Genocide because it sees a political opportunity. Armenians should reject both forms of manipulation.
Israel should formally recognize the Armenian Genocide. The Knesset should approve the proposal without delay, without ambiguity and without allowing the issue to disappear when relations with Turkey become useful again. But Armenians should remain deeply skeptical of this sudden moral awakening. We should not allow our history, our trauma and the memory of our ancestors to become a cheap bargaining chip in the hands of politicians who ignored us when Turkey was useful, armed our enemies when Azerbaijan was useful, and now invoke us because we may be useful again in a confrontation over F-35s, Washington and regional power.
Recognition matters. But recognition that appears only when history becomes strategically useful is not solidarity. It is the politicization of genocide memory, and Armenians should not allow themselves to become cannon fodder in someone else’s geopolitical war.
—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis
Why Israel Suddenly “Recognized” the Armenian Genocide
CC: An Island with No Name: The Many Lives of San Lazzaro before Abbot Mkhitar
By Sebouh David AslanianHyeWay.orgAt the very outset, when the site for a monastery was granted to us, it was a kind of ruined monastery, called Saint Lazarus (San Lazzaro). There, for the sake of our dwelling for the time being, Abbot Mkhit‘ar built a number of new cells, as many as sufficed for his monks, as we have written above. Now, before we had taken possession of that place, those who held it had taken no care to set any bounds upon the persons going in and out, since the place had long since been given over to desolation. But once it had been taken by us and built up…and blessed by our abbot-father, it became a dwelling for us. From that time on, as concerned those who came to our monastery from the city, he gave order to those who received them to give notice that this place was closed to the entry of outsiders.
From the beginning, today’s local monastery was granted to us, it was a crumbling monastery called Surb Lazar. Where we lived for the time being, Mkhitar abbot built a new room for us, and connected it to his house, as you wrote above. And now, until you detained us in that place, there was no point in taking away from my ingenuity, which they had in place, because there was already a disaster in the place tomorrow. But as a prisoner, he was in the mange and was built (even though the neighbor’s daughter was untouchable before our time) /412/ and blessed by our father, he was our abode. from the mind of this i.
Ever since my first visit to Venice as a student — for a summer course at the Collegio Moorat-Raphael in July of 1988, if memory serves — the island of San Lazzaro has held a special place in my imagination. It lies at the center of nearly all my imaginings about Venice, and even on those occasions when I have felt irritated at one or another of its monastic denizens, the island, with the famous silhouette of its belltower, has exerted a quiet, magical sway over most of what is genuinely valuable in my life. It is that “sway,” in part, that has drawn me to devote my next book Between State Power and Commercial Capitalism: A History of San Lazzaro and the Mkhit‘arist Renaissance, 1700-1800, to a critical history of the order that settled there more than three centuries ago.
Despite the voluminous scholarship on San Lazzaro and its erudite Armenian monks (most of it written by the monks themselves), remarkably little attention has been paid to the pre-1717 history of the island. What was San Lazzaro like before it became a gleaming beacon of the Armenian “renaissance” during the eighteenth century? Who were its former denizens, and what can a study of their episodic custodianship of the island tell us about the island’s post-1717, Mkhit‘arist history and possibly its future? These questions have at best only received a passing acknowledgment by Mkhit‘arist recorders of their own institution’s history.
The island’s first chronicler the formidable Matteos Evdokiats‘i (1688-1772) entirely elides this history;[1] others following his lead such as Abbot Stepanos Giwēr Agonts‘, the author of the first published biography of Mkhit‘ar (1810) have also passed over in silence this earlier history.[2] At most, beginning with publications from the mid- to late-1800s, a perfunctory mention is made of a “leper hospital” (leprosarium) on the premises in the middle ages. If the source is more fine-tuned, as with James Issaverdentz’s popular English language tour guide The Island of San Lazzaro (1890), it might tell us how, before Mkhit‘ar’s acquisition of the island, San Lazzaro belonged to the Ospedale di San Lazzaro e dei Mendicanti, a medieval charitable institution for lepers and beggars located on the mainland and now a modern hospital.[3] The first serious discussion that incorporated near-contemporary accounts of the island was monk Hovhannes Torossian’s important 1901 biography Vark‘ Mkhit‘aray Abbayi Sebastats‘woy (The Life of Mkhitar Abbot from Sebastea).
Figure 1.Frontispiece of Matteos of Evdokia, Chronicle of the Sacred Congregation of Armenians belonging to the Sacred Order of Saint Anthony… Unpublished manuscript San Lazzaro archives. Photo by “author.”
This work incorporated the earlier accounts by the Franciscan cosmographer and cartographer Vicenzo Coronelli’s Isolario del Atlante (1698) as well as Italian priest, and Armenophile historian, Giuseppe Cappelletti’s erudite histories of the order that have all but been forgotten now. Torossian’s insightful discussion of several pages on San Lazzaro is a lone exception in the scholarship, however. Having read Mkhit‘arist publications on the congregation’s history for the better part of two decades, one is struck by how little attention scholars have paid to the very ground upon which so much of that history unfolded.
The island of San Lazzaro itself often appears in the literature as little more than a backdrop to the larger drama of Mkhit‘arist achievement—an incidental setting rather than a historical actor in its own right. Yet the island was not merely the stage on which Mkhit‘arist history was made; it was its material foundation. The scholarship has too often treated San Lazzaro as a minor detail in the fabric of the congregation’s past, when in fact it constituted one of the fabric’s essential threads.
Figure 2. “La Chiesa et hospedale de Mendicanti,” photo: Public domain.
How would the Mkhit‘arist enterprise look if its story began to be told not in 1700 in Constantinople with the person of Mkhit‘ar and his future disciples but with arrival of leprosy in thirteenth century Venice, thus giving rise to the present name of the island where the order blossomed? Would this shift of focus contribute to a fundamental change in our understanding of the Mkhit‘arist enterprise or constitute merely one more interpretation of a now all-too-familiar topic?
In the spirit of addressing these questions and taking a few tentative steps in expanding beyond Torossian’s treatment of the island’s medieval history, I offer the notes below, cobbled together from a blog I wrote while in Venice during the summer of 2018 and now revised against Flaminio Corner’s Notizie storiche delle chiese e monasteri di Venezia, e di Torcello : tratte dalle chiese veneziane, e torcellane (1759), (Historical Notes on the Churches and Monasteries of Venice and Torcello…) with its eighteenth-century record of the island’s earlier history. This impressionistic tableau is no doubt only a preliminary step that needs thorough research in “Ospedali e luoghi pii diversi” fondes at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia.
San Lazzaro, as Torosian writes, had a “dark fate” until it passed to the abbot on that fateful September day in 1717; for much of its history, Torosian tells us, the island “served as a sanctuary for humanity’s most wretched elements: lepers, invalids in need of medical care, and mendicants.”[4] Up until the late twelfth century, the place was so insignificant that it went without a name. According to Cappelletti, from the most remote antiquity San Lazzaro belonged to the Benedictine monks of Sant’Ilario of Fusina, who in 810, by decree of Doge Giovanni Partecipazio, had crossed over from the neighboring islet of San Servolo — too narrow, and hemmed in by marshes — to settle here.[5]
In 1182, the island appears to have passed to a Venetian nobleman, Leone Paolini, who built a small chapel and hospital to care for the city’s lepers, whose numbers had swelled — apparently with the pilgrimage traffic to and from the Holy Land.[6] Here Torossian’s brief treatment must be supplemented by Corner’s Notizie storiche, a foundational work published in 1759 a decade following the passing of Mkhit‘ar.
In this seminal study of Venice’s medieval churches and ecclesiastical institutions, San Lazzaro emerges as a functioning hospital-convent whose very name preserved the memory of what it had once been. Its earlier ninth-century dedication, San Leone—perhaps an echo of Leone Paolini’s own name, or an allusion to Pope Leo of Chalcedon fame—gave way in the thirteenth century to San Lazzaro, patron saint of lepers and thus a fitting title for such a house. As a leprosarium with its primitive rooms and an operating church, the island today has at least one Gothic script marble inscription dating to 1348 marking the building of its church and another to 1453. Corner’s documents trace a succession of priors across the medieval centuries, and the narrative this yields reads almost as a parable of the island’s later fortunes: authority passing, by slow degrees, from one custodian to the next.
By the close of the sixteenth century leprosy had all but vanished from the streets of Venice, thus triggering a shift in the Venetian state’s policy towards this tiny speck of land. In 1594 — On 24 May 1594, by Cappelletti’s reckoning, the Senate redesignated San Lazzaro to receive the mendicants and paupers who had until then roamed Venice’s alleys begging for alms and causing “disorder.” A year later, it resolved to move the institution of the leper hospital into the city, to the great hospital of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti beside Santi Giovanni e Paolo church. This left the island and its patrimony under the Mendicanti’s administration on the mainland.[7]
After 1595, San Lazzaro no longer housed a leprosarium but remained under the ownership of the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, a circumstance that would acquire unexpected significance on 26 August 1717, when the Venetian Senate granted it on renewable lease to Mkhit‘ar and his disciples. The island they received was a place already layered with centuries of history, whose association with the Mkhit‘arist revival formed only the latest chapter in a much longer story.
Figure 3. “Isola di S. Lazzaro, veduta da Gardino,” Vicenzo Coronelli, Isolario del Atlantesolario dell’Atlante Veneto descrizone geografico-historica, sacro-profana, antico-moderna, politica, naturale, e poetica . . . , 2 vols. (Venice, 1696).
During the seventeenth century, the island appears to have been all but abandoned. Vincenzo Coronelli, whose Isolario I have had occasion to read closely, found San Lazzaro at the end of the 1600s inhabited only by a chaplain saying his daily Mass and a few ortolani — gardeners — tending its soil.[8] Into this quiet interval, the Mkhit‘arist tradition inserts a further set of transient guests. Torossian, probably following Coronelli (p. 47), reports that in 1660 the Dominicans, fleeing Crete or Candia, settled there by a decree of the Senate.[9] The episode still awaits more corroboration. What is firmer is that in 1711 two Venetian patricians, Paolo Pisani and Gian Francesco Labia, obtained permission from the Mendicanti to build a nosocomio (hospital) on the island — a venture that came to nothing, leaving San Lazzaro to its lonely gardeners until Mkhitʻar.[10]
San Lazzaro Redux: From Stultifera Navis and Insularity to Global hub of Cultural production in the diaspora.
At this point it is worth pausing to reflect on what sort of place San Lazzaro had been before Mkhitʻar’s arrival. The island’s history was at once a succession of occupants as it was of social functions. For centuries the place served as a repository for those whom Venetian society wished to place at a distance from itself: first lepers, later mendicants, invalids, and possibly other marginal groups like fleeing Greek Dominicans. Situated within sight of the city yet separated from it by water, San Lazzaro belonged to what might be called a wider “geography of exclusion” that appears to have characterized both Venice and much of Renaissance Europe. The impetus for the rise of exclusionary or segregationist practices during the Medieval period appears to have been the rise of leprosy during the thirteenth century.[11]
No modern thinker has reflected more provocatively on leprosy and the creation of such spaces of segregation than Michel Foucault. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961/1965), the French philosopher argued that although leprosy gradually disappeared from Western Europe by the late sixteenth century, the institutions and mental structures that had been created to segregate lepers endured long after the disease itself had faded. “Leprosy withdrew,” Foucault writes, “leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended to suppress it.”[12] Yet the structures of exclusion survived, ready to be occupied by new categories of marginal people: lunatics and madmen, those such as criminals considered unfit for society. In the case of San Lazzaro, the sequence of successive custodians included the Benedictines, lepers, mendicants and beggars, and finally persecuted Dominicans.
Equally suggestive in this connection is Foucault’s controversial discussion of the Stultifera Navis, or “ship of fools,” a powerful image of Renaissance practices of exclusion. Whether such vessels actually existed and periodically “conveyed their insane cargo from place to place,” as Foucault maintained, or were primarily symbolic and literary constructs, as many of his critics have argued, the ship of fools occupied a prominent place in the cultural imagination of the period.[13] Its ubiquity in block prints, engravings, and other visual representations points to a broader social logic: the desire to remove troublesome or marginal persons from the civic body while never entirely placing them beyond the horizon of society’s gaze.
Figure 4. Stultifera Navis, engraving from Sebastian Brant, (1458-1521) [Nuremberg: Georg Stuchs, after 1 March 1497]. Reprinted in Nuremberg from the edition of Basel: Johann Bergmann de Olpe, 1 March 1497.
Seen from this perspective, the transfer of San Lazzaro from the Ospedale dei Mendicantito Mkhitʻar and his disciples in 1717 marks more than a change of tenants. It represents a liminal moment, a profound transformation in the island’s symbolic identity. A place long associated with confinement, abandonment, and social exclusion was reborn as a center of learning, scholarship, and cultural renewal. The waters that had once separated lepers from the city streets now protected a community of scholars whose intellectual horizons stretched from Venice to Constantinople, New Julfa, Madras, Calcutta, Manila, and beyond.
This transformation was striking because while the island underwent a profound shift towards openness to the world, it also retained its insular character. As Matteos Evdokiats‘i in the passage quoted at the start of this essay intimates, San Lazzaro remained a place apart, an insulated abode for piety and knowledge production, jealously guarded by Mkhit‘ar and cordoned off from the world of mundane affairs. Matteos clarifies:
What is more, when the solid, ingeniously wrought, exquisite buildings had been raised, he barred and shut [the place] altogether, so that there should be no entry for outsiders, save only to proceed straight along the path to the church. Upon the doors through which there was entry into the monastery he set locks, and we, each of us holding a key, would in our comings and goings open with the key and then lock [it] again behind us.[14]
Matteos’s comments here regarding how Mkhit‘ar had “barred and shut” the island from outsiders are made to emphasize the founder’s stern commitment to discipline and “modesty.” It is important to emphasize here that the kind of isolation and “apartness” that Mkhit‘ar introduced to his monks or novices was fundamentally of a different order than that evoked by the allegory of Foucault’s Stultifera Navis.
Isolation here no longer serves exclusion; it fosters concentration, preservation, modesty, and study. The island’s previous inhabitants did not choose to be settle on the island. They were sent there because they were regarded as dangerous, burdensome, unwanted, or pitied. Mkhitʻar’s monks chose the island as the abode for their erudite missionary order precisely because distance from the world of mundane affairs enabled them to engage the world more effectively through scholarship, printing, translation, and education.
In this sense, the history of San Lazzaro after 1717 reverses the Foucauldian pattern sketched above. For centuries, the island had been a space of segregation, a relic of the late medieval and Renaissance world of the stultifera navis. When it passed into the hands of Abbot Mkhitʿar on 8 September 1717, however, it was transformed from a place of banishment into a center of cultural illumination. What had stood at the margins of Venetian society emerged as a central hub of Armenian intellectual life across the diaspora, while also becoming an integral component of Venetian governance and state power.
A medieval geography of exclusion and isolation in the word’s literal sense, under the Mkhitʿarists, San Lazzaro became a space of connection and openness to the world. It was a cultural node—linked across seas and oceans—binding dispersed Armenian communities into a multi-circuit network that stretched across the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean and ultimately the globe. A former leper colony was thus reimagined, in the age of the European Enlightenment, as a small but globally connected space of learning, scholarship, and exchange.
Although the island retained essentially the same physical form through successive custodianships and later nineteenth-century land-reclamation projects, its symbolic meaning was fundamentally subverted beginning in the early eighteenth century. With Mkhitʿar’s apparition in the lagoon, a landscape once associated with confinement was recast as a site of mobility, communication, and cultural renewal.
As if sensing this symbolic and ontological transformation, Torossian writes, with a disciple’s pride, “the task of transforming the fate of that wretched islet and making it celebrated among all the islands of the lagoon, was left to Mkhitʻar.”[15] The decree by which the Senate granted him the island as a place of “perpetual abode” is dated 26 August 1717 and is worth excerpting:
This Venerable Congregation having read the written petition of the reverend monks of the congregation of Saint Anthony the Great, coming from Methoni in the Kingdom of Morea, by which they ask that permission to lease the island of San Lazzaro, including this holy place, and all its possessions and appurtenances as are found in the present state, be granted by this congregation, so that [the reverend monks] may establish their home upon the island according to the terms and conditions presented in their petition.[16]
Equipped with this Senatorial verdict, Mkhitʻar left his rented house in Castello — not far, as it happens, from the apartment I rented during my 2018 stay — on 8 September 1717, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin and took possession of the island.[17] In return for the grant, his fledgling order undertook to say one daily Mass in perpetuity for the island’s former occupants, the Mendicant Friars, a duty apparently kept up into the 1830s.[18] They also agreed that “they shall not at any time alter, but must instead conserve, the very ancient name, which is and must continue to be the island of San Lazzaro.”[19] As Flaminio Corner’s mid-eighteenth-century account indicates, the Mkhitʻarists received possession of a former leprosarium on reasonable terms, and very soon, with the alms and patronage of Armenian merchant capitalists and support of the Venetian state they transformed the place from a geography of banishment and squalor into a hub of renaissance style “ad fontes” (to the sources) cultural revival.[20]
True to Torossian’s claim, for close to three hundred years Mkhitʻar’s heirs have not merely inhabited the island without interruption; they have enlarged it by land-reclamation, beautified its once-ramshackle chapel, raised living quarters, a museum with a manuscript library holding several thousand priceless Armenian codices — and made this small mound of earth in the middle of the lagoon a veritable workshop of the Armenian cultural renaissance of the eighteenth century. Under Mkhit‘ar’s guidance, in historian Leo’s words, San Lazzaro with its tiny monastic order was transformed into “a small miniature Armenia, not a homeland of ruins and slavery, but one of books.”[21]
Today the monks have dwindled to an all-time low, and the order stands at an uncertain crossroads. The island’s own history offers a sobering gloss: all of its former inhabitants were there not as owners or permanent residents but as temporary custodians whose fate was predicated on an edict of Venice’s governing body (the Senate) or the Papacy. Mkhitʻar’s disciples have left a deeper mark, and stayed longer, than any of their predecessors: longer than the lepers, the mendicants, the gardeners, or the Dominicans (if Dominicans there were).
Given the sad times that have fallen on the order, it remains to be seen whether the island’s stubborn habit of changing custodians in swift succession will hold for the heirs of the illustrious Mkhitʻar, or whether they will prove the long-term exception. Let us hope it is the latter.
ENDNOTES
[1] Matthew of Eutokia, Chronicle of the Holy Order of the Armenians “by the Order of the Holy Abbot Antony” of the Reverend Mkhitarai, the First Abbot of Norogel, tells the story of everything in the Holy Order, beginning with the sora of the first construction and according to the Yapa, the honorable father of Matthew theology. (Matteos of Evdokia, Chronicle of the Sacred Congregation of Armenians belonging to the Sacred Order of Saint Anthony reformed by his Eminence and first Abbot, Abbot Mkhitar, wherein is told all things pertaining to this Holy Order beginning from the first year of the creation of the Order and onward, done by Esteemed Father, Matteos of Evtokia, archimandrite of theology) (Venice, 1700-1742)
[2] Stepannos G. Agonts‘ Patmut‘iwn kenats‘ ew varuts‘ Teaṛn Mkhit‘aray Sebastats‘woy Rabunapeti ew Abbayi /hōrineal Step‘annosi Giwvēr Agonts‘ Arhiepiskoposi ew Abbayi [History of the life and times of the Master Mkhit‘ar of Sebastea, the Master and Abbot, written by Giwvēr Agonts‘, Archbishop and Abbot] (Venice: San Lazzaro, 1810)
[3] James Issaverdentz, The Island of San Lazzaro or the Armenian Monastery Near Venice(Venice: San Lazzaro, 1890), 5-6.
[4] Yovhannes V. Torosyan [H. Torossian], Behavior of Mkhitarai Abba of Sebastatsu (Venice: San Lazzaro, 1901), 295.
[5] Giuseppe Cappelletti, Storia dell’Isola di S. Lazzaro e della Congregazione de’ Monaci Armeni (Venice: Tipo-Litografico di M. Fontana, 1877), 3: “Questa, da remotissima età, apparteneva ai monaci benedettini di Sant’Ilario di Fusina, i quali, nell’anno 810, per deliberazione del doge Giovanni Partecipazio, avevano abbandonato la contigua isoletta di san Servolo, perciocchè troppo angusta e tra paludi ristretta, ed ivi s’erano trasferiti.”
[6] Cappelletti, Storia, 4–5.
[7] Cappelletti, Storia, 13–14.
[8] Vincenzo Coronelli, Isolario (Venice, 1696), 47.
[9] Tʻorosean, Vaṛkʻ Mkhitʻaray, 297. The “Dominicans of Candia” episode is widely repeated in the Venetian local-history literature but, so far as I have been able to determine, without a securely cited primary source. The date also varies across accounts (some place the refugees nearer to 1651). It is offered here as Torossian provides it.
[10] The abortive 1711 plan of the patricians Paolo Pisani and Gian Francesco Labia to raise a nosocomio on the island, has also scarcely been mentioned and deserves a close archival study.
[11] See Guenter B. Risse, “Hospitals as Segregation and Confinement Tools: Leprosy and Plague,” in Mending Bodies and Saving Souls, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 167-230.
[12] Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 6.
[13] Ibid., 8. For an early account of historians’ critiques of Foucault’s inaccurate claims, see Colin Gordon, “History, madness and other errors: a response,” History of the Human Sciences, 3, 3 (1990): 381-396.
[14] Moreover, today the building is stable, ingenious, and not a nightmare, it is forbidden to enter from all the different people, but only to go straight to the church. Outside, when I was hunting, I entered the van, locked it, and each of us having a key, opened the door with our key and locked it from inside.
[15] Torossian, 295.
[16] Michela Dal Borgo: “Petition of Abbot Mekhitar to the Venetian Senate. 1716 (7 November) ASVe, Senato, Terra, filza 1515, insert in the draft of the decision of the Senate of 26 August 1717,” in Armenia: Imprints of a Civilization, eds. Gabriella Uluhodjian, Levon Boghos Zekiyan, Vartan Karapetyan (Venice: Skira, 2011), 314.
[17] Corner, Notizie storiche, 500, dating the Senate’s permission to 17 September 1716 and recording that the congregation received possession from the Governors of the Hospital of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti “su condizioni ragionevoli,” rescuing the all-but-ruinous church and re-founding the monastery; Mkhitar’s death is given there as 17 April 1749, with Stefano Melchiori (Stepʻanos Melkʻonean) of Constantinople substituted in 1750. The Mkhitarist tradition dates the Senate’s grant to 26 August 1717 and the taking of possession to 8 September 1717; the one-year divergence between Corner and the congregation’s own reckoning should be reconciled against the Senato (Terra) registers and the cession instrument preserved in the congregation’s archive on San Lazzaro itself. Torosian, Vaṛkʻ Mkhitʻaray, 298.
[18] Dal Borgo: “Petition of Abbot Mekhitar to the Venetian Senate,” 314.
[19] Ibid.
[20] For an excellent study of Mkhitar’s renaissance humanism and the role of “ad Fontes” (to the sources) that animated Mkhit‘ar’s enterprise, see Jennifer Manoukian, “Purity and the Past, 1730-1830,” in Purist Pursuits: Language, Global Ideas, and the Creation of Western Armenian in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2026), 32-68. See also Paolo Lucca, “The Religious and Humanist Inspiration of Abbot Mekhitar and his School,” in Armenia: Imprints of a Civilization, eds. Gabriella Uluhogian, Boghos Levon Zekiyan, Vartan Karapetyan (Venice: Skira, 2011), 317-321.
[21] Leo, Hayots‘ Patmut‘iwn (History of the Armenians), vol. 3 (Yerevan: HSSH GA, 1947), p. 503. Cf. Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), p. 103.
168: Pashinyan is punishing his voters
July 3, 2026
In recent days, many people were upset by the information that starting from July 1, several tens of thousands of citizens no longer will not receive social benefits. Many categories of pensioners, whose pensions have been increased by the government by 10,000 drams, and who have also become beneficiaries of the health insurance system, belong to them.
The government’s argument is that since their incomes have increased, they no longer receive benefits. The indignant people were upset not only by the fact itself, but also by the fact that the government has been depriving people of benefits, especially since July, when the elections have already ended, and Nikol Pashinyan received the votes of all those people to whom he distributed election bribes at the expense of all taxpayers in the form of increased incomes.
What happened, with all its abomination, contains certain components of justice. In the sense that all those who blindly believed in Pashinyan’s promises and who preferred the conditional 10 thousand drams to the tragedies caused by his fault to Armenia and Artsakh, the spilled blood and sacrifices of more than 5,000 young people, here they all really get, including being deprived of benefits.
You have to pay for everything, and now all those people are paying to elect Pashinyan, who lost the war during the elections, surrendered Artsakh, generates hatred against the Armenians of Artsakh, and fights against Armenianness.
In that sense, they are lucky, because the allowance is an unimaginably small price that one can and should pay to wrap this crap around Armenia’s neck.
This story, however, has a wider context and raises the issue of civil responsibility in general, the payment of a person for any act of public significance. Elections in Armenia have always been treated as a performance, in which participation is something like a protocol.
The most cunning ones not only participated, but also snatched some material compensation from one side or the other. But due to individual choice, there was no mechanism of collective responsibility and individual payment again, as such, there was not and cannot be. But life shows that it should be, at least in the future not to let anti-state elements close to power.
The devilishness of this payment mechanism, however, is that the voters of this government pay not all those who did not elect the government and who have to suffer the deprivations made inevitable by the former, but … the same government.
In other words, this is a monetary settlement between the government and its own electorate, which has nothing to do with real justice. Meanwhile, the justice would be that the citizens who voted for the CP should somehow pay more than 700,000 to those citizens who rejected Nikol Pashinyan. But even in the case of payment, there was hardly any question of justice, because most of the refusers did it not for material gain, but thus protecting dignity, the last remaining fragments of Armenianness.
Nikol Pashinyan, using administrative levers, power structures, external support and the state budget, won not only and not so much his political opponents, but those very people, the citizens of RA, who will have to endure national shame and indignity for at least another 5 years because of the citizens who elected him and were deprived of social benefits.
Everything, yes, has a price in life. Several tens of thousands of citizens are paying for Pashinyan’s rule by being deprived of social benefits, while at least five thousand people have paid for it with their lives, and an entire people living in Artsakh with their homeland. And this is not a story about justice, but about cosmic injustice.
Harutyun Avetisyan
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This process actually has one goal: to isolate the government from the political field
July 3, 2026
Armen Hovasapyan writes: “The Anti-Corruption Court has just extended the detention of my friend Armen Ashotyan for another month.
It has been almost a month since Ashotyan has been imprisoned in a case whose political context is so obvious, besides, it has long ceased to be perceived as an ordinary criminal proceeding. This process, which started on June 5, actually has one goal: to isolate one of the most active and prepared opponents of the government from the political field through the law enforcement and judicial system.
I should say that Armen is one of the representatives of the RPA, who in recent years has consistently formed the most substantive criticism of the government’s foreign and domestic policy, both on the Armenian and international platforms. It is noteworthy that Ashotyan was arrested one day before the start of the elections, and during that period his political statements became even more intense. for that very purpose another mechanism was implemented (already used for about 25 months). That is why this case is not only about Armen. it is a political message to the entire opposition field, to the government and especially to the main illegitimate, the sharp speech, as we can see, is silenced by criminal cases.
The most telling aspect of this story is that the government, which once promised to put an end to selective justice, is fighting for free speech every day, and today it is presenting new evidence every day that the political order can be much stronger than the law.
Patience my friend.
Freedom to Armen and all political prisoners.”
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A change of the Prosecutor General and the Chairman of the Central Committee is expected. Pashinyan is unhappy
July 3, 2026
For several days now, Nikol Pashinyan’s entire campaigning political resource has been directed against the judicial system. In all his public speeches, he condemns the judiciary, naturally, packaging it with the demand of the people.
It was clear that these would not be just words hanging in the air, and Pashinyan will try to make the judicial system, which is almost entirely dependent with rare exceptions, completely independent.
However, it was clear from his shameful speech on the Prosecutor’s Day that Pashinyan is also dissatisfied with the work of the prosecutor’s office. And while the law enforcement system and the media were trying to understand what would follow this, the answer was not late.
According to 168.am, there will be changes in Nikol Pashinyan’s bankrupt personnel bank. Prosecutor General Anna Vardapetyan will be appointed the president of the Supreme Judicial Council (HCC), which, of course, the acting president Artur Atabekyan cannot welcome.
The latter is trying to deal with it in his own way, hoping to win Pashinyan’s heart by obtaining judicial acts glorifying Pashinyan’s soul through his close friends in the judicial system. Today’s decision of the Anti-Corruption Court to extend the absurd detention of RPA Vice-President Armen Ashotyan for another month was based on that logic.
But Artur Atabekyan, who listened to how Nikol Pashinyan pours spoils on the head of the system under his own leadership during a solemn event on the occasion of the Day of the Public Prosecution, is not the only beneficiary of this story.
The problem is that the next position of the President of the Central Bank of Ukraine was promised to Karen Tumanyan, a lawyer-scientist of the Central Bank of Ukraine (lawyers-scientists can read this with valocardin – S.G.), and now that issue must also be resolved, because Anna Vardapetyan did not agree to alternative proposals, for example, to become the president of the chamber of the Court of Cassation.
The position of the vacant Prosecutor General will probably be offered to Nikol Pashinyan’s irreplaceable staff, Argishti K., the former chairman of the Investigative Committee.yAramyan, which will be a nightmare for Anna Vardapetyan, but a blessing for the heads of two investigative bodies.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear decision on this yet… Still…
Other actions against the judicial system are also planned, but their chronology and other details are still being finalized.
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There has been one court hearing in the Sevak Abrahamyan case since January. will be sued
July 3, 2026
During the 2020 44 Day War Arman Tamrazyan, the lawyer of the commander of the Mataghis military unit, Sevak Abrahamyan brought back in a criminal case We last talked about the court process in January of this year. And it turns out that there have been no developments in these months, and the reason is more than clear: there are no court hearings.
“What we talked about is at the same stage, nothing has changed, we have not done anything, no meeting has taken place. There was only one hearing during this time, and I submitted a petition to stop the prosecution of the colonel, because at this stage it was possible to dismiss the case, the court postponed the hearing to see if we will discuss the issue at the end, and we have not held any hearings since then.
The courts are overburdened, there are probably 200 cases in the judge’s proceedings, when he gets it, it means we go, we work, if he doesn’t get it, the session doesn’t take place. This case is in the proceedings of judge Harutyun Manukyan,” explained the lawyer.
Let us remind that in 2022 Investigative Committee message was distributed, where it was specifically mentioned that Abrahamyan one day before the war՝ On September 26, 2020, with the participation of the main part of the officers of the military unit and other guests invited by him, about 100 officers of the Defense Army, he organized and held a party dedicated to the formation day of the military unit. During that time, he received reports from the commanders of the subordinate units included in the combat duty on the sharp increase in the danger of the movement of forces, resources, accumulations and transition of combat operations in the front line and in the rear of the enemy.
But, according to the Central Committee, being obliged to take a decision to bring all the personnel and resources of the military unit to the level of full combat readiness, go on the defense to replenish the combat positions and in this way identify, prevent, counter the enemy’s sudden attack and report it to the immediate chief at the first opportunity, Sevak Abrahamyan, the commander of the Mataghis military unit, did not take any measures in that direction.
Meanwhile, his lawyer insisted to us that all of the former head of the RA Armed Forces General Onik Gasparyan orders have been done:
It should be noted that after the indictment of Judge Artush Gabrielyan and the suspension of his powers, after the re-inscribing of this case in his proceedings, there were rumors that not only the unexamined witnesses should be interrogated by the court, but also those who were interrogated before this.
“We have finished the preliminary hearings, let’s start the main hearings, then we will understand whether we will not actually interrogate those we have already interrogated, and call the remaining ones for interrogation, there are still 40 witnesses left,” Arman Tamrazyan said.
The case related to the 44-day war is in court in 2023. since January, it was first sent to Syunik region, then moved to Yerevan, and the number of subpoenaed witnesses is 51.
We reported that the former chief of the RA Armed Forces General Staff was questioned in the case of the commander of Mataghis Onik Gasparyan, former commander of the Armed Forces Jalal Harutyunyan, During the 44-day war, the commander of the 10th Mountain Rifle Division of the Armed Forces Karen Shakaryan, Acting Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia Edward Asryan and others.
As we reported last year, the former commander of the Mataghis military unit is under administrative control.
And Sevak Abrahamyan’s case is not the only wartime criminal case that has not yet reached the finish line, that is, there is no verdict of the first instance, the important thing is that they made noise at the beginning. Of course, we do not justify organizing a party a day before the war.
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“Who will leave us to go to Nikol Pashinyan? Is this a democrat? Let us go to four sides
July 3, 2026
Residents of Garnikyan 3 building in Aknalich village of Armavir marz faced the fact that their 4th class emergency building is collapsing day by day, but no one is paying attention.
One of the residents of the building, Nver Khachatryan, on 168.am conveyed that more than 100 people live in the building, most of them are children, all of them are in danger.
According to him, everyone is aware of the problem, even Nikol Pashinyan, but everyone is deceiving themselves and does not provide any solution to the issue.
“In 1988, the seismic service evacuated us from that building within 48 hours, because it was emergency and dangerous for all of our lives. They cut off water and electricity, considered the building dangerous, gave us cabins to stay in. Then they laid the foundation of the building to build a new building, but the earthquake happened, followed by the Artsakh movement, and the building remained like that.
Now that foundation is there, they turned it into a dump, it’s a complete sewer. Would you believe that there is no such state structure that we do not apply to, Nikol Pashinyan is also aware of this problem, I personally approached him during the pre-election campaign and told him,” said Nver Khachatryan.
He mentioned that every day stones and soil are falling from the building, the residents of the building are trying to fix the stones in place and live, because they have nowhere to go.
“It is not possible to do anything now, the rainwater is already pouring into the building. Especially during the Artsakh war, when the Armenians from Baku escaped the massacre and arrived in Armenia, we remained silent, we told them to accommodate the Armenians, they would address our problem, we believed, but they did nothing.
TKE Minister Davit Khudatyan is well aware of this problem, he was the governor of Armavir before he was appointed as the minister. Before the elections, I took all the pictures and papers of the building with my own hands and gave them to them.
The seismic service of Yerevan sent a specialist to us, they came with 2 people without tools, climbed to the roof, came down, wrote and erased. Then they turned the 4th grade emergency building into a 3rd grade emergency building. I called those people, I say: either you are stupid or you put us in the place of fools, no repairs were done in our building, how did it become 3rd class? I said: if it is so, then after 5 years it should become a first class emergency.
We also applied to a private seismic service, the person looked and said that the building is in the 4th degree of emergency. He also said to get out of the building because it will collapse,” added our interlocutor.
Nver Khachatryan also said that no one has given them a guarantee that the building will not collapse, at the moment the only hope of the residents is the media to cover their problem until the officials start working.
“We want to turn to the Prosecutor’s Office, now who will let us go to Nikol Pashinyan? Is this democratic? We are being deceived from all sides. Is this democratic?” Our lawyer tells us to apply to the European Court, this concerns human lives, especially as minor children live in the building.
At least they should think about the children, when Davit Khudatyan was the governor, he told us that the documents of the building are with the minister, and now at least he is the minister,” emphasized our interlocutor.
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What made Andranik Kocharyan “burnt”, what episode put him in a bad situation
July 3, 2026
On July 2 168.amwith the caption “Andranik Kocharyan’s son was invited to a training camp, it turned out that he is not liable to be called, and in the case of Ashot Pashinyan, the military specialization will not be published.” article: published, where in our written inquiry sent to the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia, among other questions, one more question was about whether to invite his youngest son, Vazgen Kocharyan, to the 25-day training camp.
In particular, we were interested in Suren Papikyan, Minister of Defense of the Republic of Armenia: «NA: protection and: safety CommissionerVazgen Kocharyan, the youngest son of Andranik Kocharyan, the chairman of the Standing Committee of the Soviet Union, after completing his mandatory military service, did he ever receive a notice to participate in a training camp during these years, and if not, why, on what basis?
But at the same time we also tried to find out: “In general, can you name any official’s son who has participated in the training sessions?”
The Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia stated in its response to our questions.
«Vazgen Andranik Kocharyan was invited to the military commissariat to participate in training sessions. and in accordance with Article 17 of the RA Law “On Military Service and the Status of Servicemen” was referred to the primary health care center, 2018 of the RA Government. to pass the examination defined by point 2.1 of Annex 2 of the decision N 405-N of April 12.
Based on the results of research conducted by the organization providing primary health care services in the established order, the Medical Commission of the Yerevan No. 2 Military Commissariat of the Republic of Defense of the Republic of Armenia, in accordance with the requirement of the 5th column of the Resolution N 404-N of the Government of the Republic of Armenia of April 12, 2018, was recognized as “not subject to being called up for training.”
As for the question of the participation of the sons of officials in the training sessions, such statistics are not maintained.”
In other words, only our request to the Ministry of Defense and the response of the department were presented. Moreover, we reminded that the son first served in the military in Artsakh, and then in Vanadzor, again based on official information. We did not ask any questions about what battles did his artillery boy who served in “Haykazov” participate in during the 44-day war, where and when did he come from Artsakh to Yerevan? Moreover, we once again included a question about Nikol Pashinyan’s son in our survey.
But now and then, Andranik Kocharyan was “excited” and during a briefing with journalists, when they asked him a question about his son, referring to our article, he responded.
“168.am received the answer. My son went through the war, we are talking about Vazgen, it is not by chance that I gave him that name, and it is not by chance that he was born and should have moved like that. He is an Armenian who participated in the 44-day war until the last day, and I am proud now. Whatever they say, they can write. It’s clear, isn’t it, that a guy who’s been through the war can’t shy away from the offer? But after the proposal goes to the medical examination, months before that my son had a very serious surgery, a shoulder joint, and a very serious one. When the next offer is to the defense department, he will undergo a medical examination again, and if everything is normal, he will definitely go to those meetings, don’t doubt it. Don’t fall into the waters of 168, lady Satenik Seyranyan has long been smitten with Andranik Kocharyan.”
As we can see, Andranik Kocharyan, “falling into the waters of 168”, reproduces what we wrote, supplementing the answer sent to us by the Ministry of Defense. But on the other hand, he is trying to distort the image and create the impression that we presented his son as a truant, where did he see this when there is no comment?
And this is done by a man who, during the days of the resistance movement in 2022, called on the RA Police and the National Security Service to collect the data of citizens participating in political events and actions of the opposition and transfer them to the RA Ministry of Defense, which, according to him, “will use these “well-trained” young people capable of following simple instructions to enrich the mobilization resources of our army and involve them in maintaining the security of the borders of Armenia and Artsakh.”
At the same time, information was spread in the press that summonses to participate in the three-month mobilizations of the Ministry of Defense were sent to the opposition, including Taron Manukyan, the son of MP Gegham Manukyan, who was in custody at the time and participated in the 44-day war. At that time, Kocharyan made a similar call to journalists as well to address
Let’s not forget that some time ago, during a briefing with journalists, Andranik Kocharyan, addressing the journalist’s question as to why his eldest son did not serve in the army, answered: “My son is a very high class boy, even if you have his knowledge, you will not serve.”
This statement of Andranik Kocharyan caused criticism among the public. Kocharyan’s post was also addressed by RA Health Minister Anahit Avanesyan, whose two sons are currently serving in the RA Armed Forces, after which Kocharyan had to apologize.
By the way, can Andranik Kocharyan freely give details about what battles his son participated in during the 44-day war, when he left Artsakh, maybe he was wounded or not, like Nikol Pashinyan’s son who volunteered for the war (for which we are happy, they are young), if one day we decide to send an inquiry about this as well, what we did, by the way, in the case of Ashot Pashinyan and not once did we get an answer as to where he was at that time.
And? 168.amAndranik Kocharyan himself has a reason to be “burnt” because we have always been correct in our military and war articles and “hit” the target.
In particular, at this moment, Andranik Kocharyan, the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Defense and Security of the National Assembly, according to our information, has taken a hard time and is in a bad situation, when we fixed it An episode of an interview given to “Armenia” TV on March 17, which was directly related to Nikol Pashinyan and Vazgen Sargsyan.
“I will suggest that we create an opportunity for Arman Tatoyan to stand by the positions he is talking about, and this should be initiated. He talks about positional changes that did not happen. The best solution is for Arman Tatoyan to go to those positions and show which positions have been changed. Such a story it was in the 1990s, when some media made such wrong statements, Vazgen Sargsyan did not hesitate and provided a helicopter, he said: go to Kelbajar and see if we actually provide service in Kelbajar or not,” he said.
According to various reports, the name of journalist Nikol Pashinyan is connected with this story. This is the first.
Secondly, we pay attention in the case of an interview given to another media invite that Andranik Kocharyan made a dangerous declassification and talked about a “secret operation” that was not approved by ICAO, and which could put Armenia in serious trouble because Aliyev tried to get it approved.
Moreover, if this is true, then we are dealing with the publication of a “pure” state, military secret, and that too by the chairman of the 44-day investigative commission.
We are still putting aside some of the illegal statements made during the work of the 44-day investigative commission, and finally, the problem with the investigative commission’s report, which is why it was also not presented. At least that’s what NA Speaker Alen Simonyan said publicly.
The series of interesting episodes related to Andranik Kocharyan can be continued, but we do not want to go beyond the content and logic of the previous article, so let’s limit ourselves to this.
By the way, Andranik Kocharyan would do well not to hide behind Vazgen Sargsyan at every opportunity.
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Israel announces that the next clash will be with Turkey. Vladimir Avatk
July 3, 2026
168TVof “Trigger” the guest of the program Doctor of political sciences, Russian Turkologist Vladimir Avatkov.
During the program, the results of the parliamentary elections held in Armenia and their possible recognition by the Russian Federation were discussed.
Special attention was paid to Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s visit to Moscow, the role of Russia and Turkey in the South Caucasus, EU and EAEU relations, as well as energy security issues.
In addition, Israel’s decision to recognize the Armenian Genocide, the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh and the prospects for further development of regional processes in the South Caucasus were discussed.
Hayk Derzyan
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Change of envoy without change of process. What is expected in Armenia?
July 3, 2026
Ruben Rubinyan, the candidate of the ruling “Civil Pact” party for the position of president of the to-be-formed National Assembly, will not continue to be Armenia’s special representative in the negotiations with Turkey, if elected. Ruben Rubinyan stated this in a conversation with journalists today.
It should be reminded that Ruben Rubinyan, the Armenian envoy to the Armenian-Turkish negotiations, was chosen by the “Civil Agreement” as a candidate for the president of the National Assembly, which will be formed as a result of the June 7 elections.
“Since I was elected as a candidate for the President of the National Assembly, if elected, I will obviously not continue to be a special representative of Armenia in the negotiations with Turkey,” Rubinyan announced today. He also mentioned that as far as he knows, it is not yet known who will replace him as the envoy of the Armenian side. “But the prime minister and the government will discuss,” said the NA vice-president.
By the way, it is noteworthy that the special representative of Turkey, Serdar Kilic, recently congratulated Ruben Rubinyan in the process of normalization of Armenia-Turkey relations. Kilch wrote on X’s microblog page:
“I congratulate Ruben Rubinyan, my partner in the process of normalization of Turkey-Armenia relations, on the occasion of his election to the position of speaker of the Armenian parliament. Over the past four years, we have created a productive work culture and sincere friendship. I wish him continued success in his new position.” Turning to this congratulation, Rubinyan said why Kilic should not have congratulated him, he received congratulations from Russia and other places in the same way.
The departure of Ruben Rubinyan from the position of the special representative of Armenia in the Armenian-Turkish settlement process essentially provides an opportunity to reassess the real effectiveness of the negotiation platform formed in recent years. Although many meetings took place during this period, joint statements were published and external dynamics of dialogue were maintained, the process never turned into negotiations leading to a result.
And most importantly, the Armenian-Turkish border continues to remain closed, although the Turkish side has no political reason to keep it closed due to the policy of the current RA authorities. And recently, the Turkish side explains the fact that the border is closed simply by technical preparatory processes. However, analysts dealing with Turkey’s regional policy clearly know that Turkey’s slowness is due to coordination with Azerbaijan.
168.amin a conversation with Russian Turkologist Viktor Nadein-Raevsky said that that platform solved the problem to the extent that it showed that Armenia and Turkey are negotiating, but the problem is not even the personalities of the negotiators, but the process, its structure and a number of key regional realities. According to him, the key decisions of Armenian-Turkish relations are made not at the level of special representatives, but by the highest political leadership of Turkey, which in turn consistently connects this issue with the development of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations.
“Ankara has never hidden that it considers the full regulation of relations with Yerevan within the framework of coordination with Baku, actually giving up the opportunity to form an independent agenda. Under these conditions, the format of special representatives gradually turned into a political communication rather than a real negotiation tool. It ensured the continuity of contacts, but did not create such mechanisms through which it would be possible to overcome the main political contradictions. In fact, a process was formed where the visibility of the negotiations was maintained, but the preconditions ensuring their results were missing,” said Victor Nadein-Raevsky.
According to him, Ankara continues to condition the Armenian-Turkish agenda exclusively on the course of the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations, which means that the appointment of a new special representative of Armenia will not change the essence of the process itself. In other words, in his opinion, only the negotiator will change, while the negotiation logic will remain the same, maintaining the imitation of dialogue without a real possibility of a political breakthrough.
He mentioned that Turkey’s regional policy in recent years has been more emphatically built on the principle of “one region, one strategy”, where the South Caucasus is considered not a separate direction, but a component of the joint Turkish-Azerbaijani geopolitical space.
Therefore, according to Viktor Nadein-Raevsky, Ankara never separated the regulation of relations with Armenia from the interests of Azerbaijan and continued to consider it as a logical continuation of the partnership with Baku.
In his assessment, Turkey’s policy towards Armenia remains conditional, every important step is evaluated in the context of coordination with Azerbaijan, and only after that, from the point of view of the Armenian-Turkish bilateral agenda.
This reality means, according to the analyst, that Turkey’s policy towards Armenia continues to remain not an independent foreign policy direction, but a tool for broader regional calculations.
“Ankara strives to maintain leverage in the South Caucasus, while strengthening its position as a regional power. Therefore, until Turkey reviews the fundamental approaches of its policy towards Armenia and does not separate the Armenian-Turkish relations from the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiation process, it is difficult to expect that even the negotiation formats will be able to provide a different result,” said Victor Nadein-Raevsky.
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