The 18-year-old Davit Minasian was rushed to a Yerevan hospital after reportedly passing out following his transfer to a juvenile institution just north of the Armenian capital in the morning. He already lost consciousness and spent a few hours in another hospital before being taken to an adult prison on Wednesday.

Minasian was arrested and charged with hooliganism and obstruction of Pashinian’s “political activities” after an incident that marred a Plam Sunday Mass in St. Anne’s Church. The church was packed with worshippers when Pashinian unexpectedly arrived there with his bodyguards and loyalists. The bodyguards had to clear the way for his passage. A visibly annoyed Minasian told them not to push him and said he wants to keep “standing in the middle” of the church.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he then told Pashinian before stretching a hand towards his shoulder.

Minasian was punched and knocked down by one of the bodyguards as Pashinian left the church amid angry cries from other believers. Pashinian defended the violent response on Thursday amid continuing opposition claims that he himself ordered the young man’s arrest and prosecution.

Minasian’s latest hospitalization added to concerns about his health and sparked more calls for his release from custody. His lawyers maintain that he must not be held in pretrial detention because of suffering from an undiagnosed chronic allergy. A Yerevan court ignored their pleas when it sanctioned the detention on Wednesday.

The judge who made the decision, Mnatsakan Martirosian, is notorious for jailing political opponents of the current and former Armenian governments. Martirosian, 63, has presided over many politically charged trials ever since taking the bench 27 years ago. He has handed down guilty verdicts in virtually all of those cases. In 2023, Martirosian was promoted to become the chairman of Armenia’s largest court of first instance.

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Unlike his predecessor, the current head of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS), Andranik Simonian, has refused to meet with their representatives since taking up his post last June.

At least 198 soldiers as well as 25 civilian residents of Karabakh were killed during the 24-hour hostilities that enabled Azerbaijan to regain control over the region. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry acknowledged around 200 combat deaths among its military personnel involved in the operation. Its troops greatly outnumbered and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from Armenia.

Karabakh’s leadership agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s ethnic Armenian residents to flee to Armenia. The refugees included the parents, wives and other relatives of the Karabakh soldiers killed in action. They left their homeland just days after hastily burying their loved ones.

Many of those bereaved refugees still hope to have the bodies of their soldiers exhumed, transported to Armenia and reburied there. They include Anzhela Arzumanian whose son, Vachagan Dadalian, was killed on the first day of the Azerbaijani assault.

“We barely managed to organize his funeral in the cemetery of the town of Martuni,” Arzumanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Thursday. “Since September 30, 2023, we have applied to various bodies in Armenia and to this day, two and a half years on, no one has provided a solution to our issue.”

Arzumanian spoke as she and several dozen other parents of fallen soldiers rallied outside the NSS headquarters in Yerevan to demand a meeting with Simonian. They were told that the NSS director, who also heads an Armenian government commission on prisoners of war and missing persons, is too busy to talk to them.

Their representatives were repeatedly received by Simonian’s predecessor Armen Abazian, who was sacked by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in June. According to Arzumanian, Abazian assured them at the last meeting that it is “possible to solve this problem.”

Simonian visited Baku last September with the declared aim of attending an international conference organized there by Azerbaijan’s State Security Service. The NSS never reported any details of the unprecedented trip.

It remains unclear whether Pashinian’s government has raised the issue of the fallen Karabakh soldiers’ reburial during its peace talks with Baku. Pashinian again alleged last week that the Karabakh Armenians did not fight back during the Azerbaijani offensive. Samvel Shahramanian, who led Karabakh at the time, rejected the allegations as false and “provocative” on Thursday.

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The head of the Rosselkhoznadzor agency, Sergei Dankvert, claimed on Thursday that many of those products do not conform to sanitary standards set by the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), a Russian-led trade bloc. He said a sharp rise in their exports to Russia observed in recent years suggests that they were produced in third countries.

“The range and quantity of products arriving gives us reason to believe that not all of them are from Armenia,” Dankvert told Russian state television. “We also looked into this in 2024 and 2023.”

In particular, he described as highly suspicious the fact that annual Armenian exports of cut flowers to Russia tripled over the last three years.

Rosselkhoznadzor seriously restricted those exports last summer, accusing the Armenian government of failing to “ensure the phytosanitary safety and traceability of flower products sent to Russia.” The government’s Food Safety Inspectorate scrambled to address the Russian concerns at the time, stepping up sanitary controls and organizing video inspections of Armenian flower greenhouses for Rosselkhoznadzor. It declined to comment on Dankvert’s latest comments on Friday.

They came the day after Putin’s talks with Pashinian in Moscow during which he publicly warned that Yerevan’s moves to eventually join the European Union are “not compatible” with Armenia’s continued membership in the EEU, which gives Armenian exporters tariff-free access to Russia’s vast market. He noted that Russia remains Armenia’s most important trading partner and supplies natural gas to the South Caucasus state at a significant discount. Putin also said that Pashinian’s administration should not bar pro-Russian opposition groups or politicians from running in Armenia’s upcoming parliamentary elections.

Russia is the main market for agricultural products as well as alcoholic beverages exported by Armenia. In the last few years, Moscow has occasionally and briefly banned some of those exports on sanitary grounds construed by Armenian commentators as Russian retaliation against the Armenian government’s continuing drift to the West.

“We have always felt that on our skin,” an Armenian truck driver regularly shipping goods to Russia told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Friday.

The driver, who did not want to be identified, said Dankvert’s statement left him and many of his colleagues bracing for more serious problems at Russian border checkpoints.

“There are concerns because we may be turned away from [the Georgian-Russian border] due to these tensions [between Moscow and Yerevan,]” he said.

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