June: 5, 2026
Undoubtedly, as in 2021, it is a struggle for existence now. Will we, as a state, be there, will Armenia be on the map, will it remain or not – that question will be decided on June 7. After the 44-day war, those who were guilty of our entire tragedy were re-elected. We are getting closer and closer to the finish line every day. Every day it seems that we have already gone down to the floor and we have no more room, but every day someone knocks from under the floor and we go down again. We are rolling into the abyss at high speed. 168TVof « expressed such an opinion during the program The mother of Haykaz Mkrtchyan, the hero of the 44-day war, Anna Mkrtchyan.
“This is the last chance, because if they are re-elected for the third time, maybe Armenia will not exist either. On June 7, the fate and future of young people will be decided, they will have to own up to it if they want to remain Armenian and keep their identity. Five or six years ago, their peers died for this land. There is no difference whether you are a resident of Artsakh or Armenia. It is the youth’s duty to choose, because we all exist and are still in Armenia thanks to the boys who fought and died,” said the heroic mother.
“Unfortunately, there are misguided parents of the victims. Shame on the parent who after all this can go and vote for the current government for the third time. Some say that they were forgiven or put in a poor person’s pocket. A poor person has no right to stand at the head of the country. If he is so poor, what is he doing there? That is an unacceptable interpretation and excuse. That war should not have happened. All this is impossible to forgive them. When he said that we would have had the same result without the victims, after that there would be no place to set foot on the streets,” Mkrtchyan said.
According to the heroic mother’s insistence, Pashinyan recently said, “We went for a conscious sacrifice, but did he ask her that she took her son to the table of sacrifice?”
“Start with you, your son. You would serve as an example, the rest of us would also think and see if we too would make that conscious sacrifice. Who are you to reserve the right to decide the fate of our children? These are the thieves of our motherland, the lives of our children, the killers of our sons and their dreams. It is not only about the victims. There are a large number of injured boys whose lives have also been ruined. It was a conscious sacrifice, so what?’
“The words uttered by them lose their meaning, what kind of sovereignty?” In other words, entering under the Turk, living under the Turk is sovereignty? These lead to it. The economic sanctions that we are facing now were specially made by them. It is a call, a warning from Russia so that we understand what awaits us. These are not dilettantes, they understand everything and do it purposefully. It is their nature to manipulate everyone. What they say, after a few days they claim the exact opposite. They don’t publish the name list of the 44-day war to keep us all in a state of suspense,” said Anna Mkrtchyan.
Details in the video
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RFE/RL – Armenian Opposition Leader Arrested Again
- Naira Bulghadarian
Armen Ashotian, a prominent opposition figure close to former President Serzh Sarkisian, was arrested on Friday on fresh corruption charges linked by his political allies to the June 7 parliamentary elections.
As part of the same criminal case, the Investigative Committee also indicted four other former officials who had served during Sarkisian’s rule. They included former Finance Minister Gagik Khachatrian and Gayane Gasparian, a former rector of Yerevan’s Brusov State University. Gasparian was arrested as well.
The committee claimed that Ashotian abused his powers to privatize a 450 square-meter property belonging to the state-run university when he served as education minister from 2009-2016. It said the property located in downtown Yerevan was purchased by one of Khachatrian’s sons at a fraction of its market value.
Ruben Melikian, a lawyer representing Ashotian, dismissed the accusations as politically motivated. Senior members of Sarkisian’s Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) likewise claimed that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian keeps trying to bully his political opponents on the eve of the tightly contested elections.
The HHK is not running in the polls. But it has urged supporters to vote for other major opposition groups challenging Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. Ashotian, who is the HHK’s deputy chairman, has sent the same message to Armenians in recent weeks on social media and in interviews with journalists.
In separate criminal cases, law-enforcement authorities also arrested two other men who held senior government positions during Sarkisian’s 2008-2018 presidency. Former Transport Minister Gagik Beglarian and former State Property Management Committee chief Arman Sahakian are facing accusations of abuse of power and vote buying respectively.
A vocal critic of Pashinian, Ashotian was already arrested in June 2023 on corruption charges stemming from property acquisitions carried out by another state university. He has strongly denied them. The 51-year-old was moved to house arrest in September 2024 and set free a year later pending a verdict in his trial which is still going on.
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Opposition Media Outlet Raided On Election Eve
- Ruzanna Stepanian
Following mass arrests of members and supporters of billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Strong Armenia alliance, law-enforcement officers raided on Friday the offices of a media outlet linked to it two days before Armenia’s parliamentary elections.
Editors and journalists of ArmatMedia.am were effectively locked up inside their offices as the National Security Service (NSS) and the Investigative Committee officers searched them for more than five hours. The investigators confiscated the reporters’ computers and mobile phones.
“The first thing they did was to log into our social media pages on our computers,” Aghavni Sukiasian, an ArmatMedia.am editor, told reporters. “And what was remarkable was that they connected the USBs they brought with them to our [main] office computer. So we don’t know what [incriminating] information their USBs contained and whether they downloaded it to the computer.”
Another editor, Nelly Avetisian, accused Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian of ordering the raid as part of an ongoing crackdown on Strong Armenia, which is widely regarded as the ruling Civil Contract party’s main election challenger.
The Investigative Committee said that the search was conducted as part of a criminal case against Aleksan Aleksanian, the online outlet’s owner and a leading member of the Karapetian’s bloc who was arrested on vote-buying charges on Tuesday
According to the committee, since last September Aleksanian has hired some 1,400 people to work for a non-governmental organization that formed the backbone of Karapetian’s opposition movement. It claims that they were paid to attend the movement’s rallies under the guise of their wages. Both Aleksanian and Strong Armenia reject the accusations as politically motivated.
Citing the same probe, investigators on Thursday raided Strong Armenia’s 50 campaign offices across the country and indicted 37 more members of the bloc as a result. Twenty-five of them were placed under arrest.
Hundreds of other Strong Armenia members or supporters have been arrested in recent months on similar charges. The authorities have opened a smaller number of such criminal cases against two other major opposition groups running in the elections. The three opposition contenders accuse them of acting on Pashinian’s orders to disrupt their election campaigns, intimidate their activists and thus increase the ruling party’s reelection chances.
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RFE/RL – Pashinian Wants No Opposition Presence In New Armenian Parliament
- Shoghik Galstian
- Gayane Saribekian
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on Friday that Armenia’s three main opposition forces must win no seats in the new National Assembly and at least one of their leaders will go to jail if he wins Sunday’s parliamentary elections.
Pashinian again branded them as foreign, presumably Russian, spies as he addressed thousands of supporters rallying in Yerevan’s central Republic Square on the last day of campaigning for the elections.
“The three-headed party of war and their tails should not enter parliament, this is a matter of the dignity of the Armenian people,” he said. “Those spy networks, those forces that think they can buy the people must be brought to their knees on that voting day.”
Pashinian went on to declare that “right after the elections” former President Robert Kocharian will be arrested again for his role in a 2008 post-election unrest in Yerevan. He also pledged to strip the leaders of the two other major opposition contenders, businessmen Samvel Karapetian and Gagik Tsarukian, of their key assets in Armenia.
All three opposition leaders are already facing criminal proceedings on various charges rejected by them as politically motivated. Pashinian pledged to “take out” them during the election campaign. Karapetian’s Strong Armenia alliance, Kocharian’s Hayastan bloc and Tsarukian’s Prosperous Armenia Party say his threats as well as pre-election mass detentions of their supporters exposed his fears of losing power.
As Hayastan wrapped up its campaign with an indoor meeting in Yerevan Kocharian insisted that the three opposition groups have a “great chance” to collectively win a majority in the Armenian parliament and oust Pashinian.
“Are we defending or betraying our history, our identity, our value system?” the ex-president appealed to voters. “Are we preserving our sovereignty, or will we become an appendage of the Turkic world and do their will?”
“I want to call on our people: give us your five minutes at polling stations and we will give you a prosperous life and strong Armenia,” Karapetian said, for his part, in a video message.
The Russian-Armenian billionaire widely regarded as Pashinian’s number one challenger remains under house arrest and has therefore not been able to physically attend his bloc’s campaign rallies.
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Vardan Ghukasyan, along with other persons, prepared to usurp the power
According to the report on the apparent crime received by the RA Investigative Committee on June 5, 2026, V.K., the head of the Gyumri community of Shirak Marz, in a group with other persons, in the course of 2025, during 2025, by means of meetings with various persons and recruitment of sympathizers, apparently carried out preparatory actions aimed at usurping the power of the RA, in other ways not provided for by the RA Constitution, but in circumstances independent of their will, they could not start the crime included in the intent. performance of the objective party. The CC has spread such a message.
In connection with the report, criminal proceedings were initiated in the main department of investigation of crimes against the state, fundamentals of the constitutional order and public security of the RA Investigative Committee under Article 43-419, Part 1 (preparation to usurp power) of the RA Criminal Code.
As part of the criminal proceedings, measures are taken to find out the identities of all the persons apparently involved in the crime, as well as the mechanisms of the crime and to give a criminal legal assessment of the actions of the persons.
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Armat Media is under investigation. what’s going on
A search is being conducted at the Armat Media editorial office starting this afternoon.
The law enforcement officers did not even allow the Armat Media journalist to tell his colleagues what was happening inside, besides, it is known that one of the journalists’ well-being worsened, but the editor was not allowed to enter.
At this moment, it is known that the phones and 2 computers of all the employees of the agency’s office were confiscated.
Marianna Ghahramanyan, spokesperson of the “Our way” movement, wrote on her Facebook page.
“What is happening in Armat Media at the moment is the manifestation of Nikol Pashinyan’s fear. Nikol Pashinyan lost in the public debate yesterday, and now he attacked the media. This is an attack on free speech, but it’s only 2 days away.”
VERELQ follows developments.
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Armen Ashotyan, Vigen Sargsyan, Gagik Khachatryan. CC has an arrest warrant
A decision was made to arrest former Minister of Education and Science Armen Ashotyan, Minister of Finance Gagik Khachatryan, the latter’s son Artyom Khachatryan, former Minister of Defense Vigen Sargsyan, former Rector of Valery Brusov State University Gayane Gasparyan and former Vice-Rector Artur Avagyan, former Deputy Director of the “Yerevan Mall” shopping center Harutyun for abuse of official authority and money laundering. to Tadevosyan.
“According to the criminal proceedings being investigated in the main department of investigation of crimes against the state, fundamentals of the constitutional order and public security of the RA Investigative Committee, factual data was obtained that A.A., who held the position of RA Minister of Education and Science in the period between 2009-2016, was authorized to promote the development of education and science, develop and implement the policy of the Republic of Armenia in the fields of education and science, from August 20, 2008 to On April 26, 2014, the chairman of the State Revenue Committee of the Republic of Armenia, then until September 20, 2016, G.Kh., who held the positions of the RA Minister of Finance, and the latter’s son, A.Kh., for the material benefit of their personal interest and group interests to ensure the acquisition of non-alienable property on favorable terms, without obstacles, as part of the group, RA “Yerevan V. “Brusov State University of Linguistics and Social Sciences” with the connivance of the Chairman of the Management Board of SNOC, GG Rector of the same SNOC, Vice-Rector AA, A.Kh., G.Kh. The immovable property of 208 million 908 thousand 500 AMD and the plot of land considered an inseparable part of it, located at 59, 38/1 Pushkin Street, Kentron Administrative District, worth 208 million 908 thousand 500 AMD, and the plot of land considered an integral part of it, was transferred to the property fund of a high-ranking official and a person related to him for non-educational purposes.
In addition, in gross violation of the provisions of the law, the higher education institution was deprived of the opportunity to manage and use the property allocated to it for educational purposes.
After that, A.Kh. and G.Kh., in the process of acquiring a real estate with an area of 451.1 square meters located at Building No. 59, 38/1 Pushkin Street, Kentron Administrative District, Yerevan City, Yerevan, RA, according to the preliminary agreement with their close friend H.T. H.T., then with the expectation of acting as a bona fide buyer, they bought the said property from the latter for 75 million AMD, registering it in the name of A.K.
For abusing official authority, aiding it, laundering large amounts of money by the group and aiding them, criminal prosecution was initiated against the above-mentioned 7 persons under the relevant articles of the RA Criminal Code.
“Decisions have been made to arrest the free defendants to bring them to court,” the report said.
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The CEC has given a “green light” to imprisoning 3 PAP deputy candidates
The CEC agreed to initiate criminal prosecution against three PAP deputy candidates: Garush Marzetsyan, Edgar Bojukyan and Naira Harutyunyan and deprive them of their freedom. This was reported by the CEC.
The petition was sent to the Central Prosecutor’s Office.
VERELQ reminds that the leader of the “Mother Armenia” movement, Andranik Tevanyan, number two on the PAP pre-election list, was detained earlier for two months.
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ՀԱԷԿ-ը նոր տեխնոլոգիաներով փոխարինելու ամերիկյան առաջարկի մասով դիրքորոշում դ
ՀՀ տարածքային կառավարման և ենթակառուցվածքների նախարարությունը ստացել է ՀԱԷԿ-ը նոր, առաջադեմ ամերիկյան փոքր մոդուլային ռեակտորների (ՓՄՌ) տեխնոլոգիաներով փոխարինելու վերաբերյալ ամերիկյան «Սարջենթ և Լունդի» (Sargent & Lundy) ընկերության կատարած նախնական տեխնիկատնտեսական գնահատման ամբողջական փաթեթը:
Այս մասին կառավարությանն ուղղված NEWS.am-ի գրավոր հարցմանն ի պատասխան հայտնել է ՀՀ տարածքային կառավարման և ենթակառուցվածքների նախարարի տեղակալ Ասատուր Վարդանյանը:
«Ներկայում Հայաստանի Հանրապետությունը դիտարկում է տարբեր երկրների առաջարկները, այդ թվում՝ նշված ամերիկյան ծագման չորս տեսակի փոքր մոդուլային ռեակտորների տեխնոլոգիաները: Այս փուլում որևէ տեխնոլոգիայի վերաբերյալ վերջնական դիրքորոշում չի ձևավորվել, և համապատասխան որոշումների ընդունման կամ դիրքորոշման ներկայացման ժամկետներ սահմանված չեն: Տեխնոլոգիաների գնահատման և քննարկման գործընթացը շարունակվում է»,- ասված է նախարարության պատասխանում:
Հիշեցնենք, որ մայիսի 19-ից 22-ը Հայաստանում էին ամերիյան «Սարջենթ և Լունդի» ընկերության փորձագետները՝ «ապահովելու տեխնիկական խորհրդատվություն փոքր մոդուլային ռեակտորների տեխնոլոգիայի վերաբերյալ»:
According to the official message released by the US Embassy, the experts of the Sargent and Lundy company, in cooperation with the RA officials, completed the preliminary technical and economic assessment of the viability of replacing the NPP with new, advanced American small modular reactor technologies. In the report, it was justified that it is appropriate for Armenia to consider 4 types of American small modular reactors.
The source reminds that the pre-election program of the ruling “Civil Agreement” party plans to specify and implement the final choice of the new nuclear power unit technology by the end of 2027.
At the same time, point 75 of the program envisages a two-fold extension of the operational period of the 2nd power unit of the National Nuclear Power Plant for 2026-2036, which means that Armenia will continue to use Russian nuclear technologies.
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«Հանրապետություն»ը կդիմի ԿԸՀ՝ «Ուժեղ Հայաստան»-ի գրանցումը ուժը կորցրած ճանաչ
«Հանրապետություն» կուսակցությունը կդիմի Կենտրոնական ընտրական հանձնաժողով՝ «Ուժեղ Հայաստան» կուսակցությունների դաշինքի ընտրական ցուցակի գրանցումը ուժը կորցրած ճանաչելու համար։ Այս մասին հայտնում են Factor TV-ի աղբյուրները։
Հիշեցնենք, որ երեկ Հանրային հեռուստաընկերության ուղիղ եթերում կազմակերպված առաջին դեմքերի բանավեճի ժամանակ ՀՀ վարչապետ Նիկոլ Փաշինյանը կոչ է արել դիմել ԿԸՀ՝ այս հարցով:
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