Armenian Defense Minister Suren Papikyan met with Belgian Minister of Defense and Foreign Trade Theo Francken during his working visit to Brussels, Papikyan said.
Papikyan shared photos from the meeting and wrote that he had met Francken on March 12 as part of his visit to the Belgian capital.
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Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan met with Ignazio Cassis, Vice President of the Swiss Confederation and head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said in a press release.
Cassis hosted Mirzoyan for a working lunch at the Federal Council’s official reception house in the historic part of Bern.
The sides praised the dynamically developing political dialogue between Armenia and Switzerland and expressed readiness to further develop the partnership in various areas. In this context, they emphasized the importance of the Armenian government’s decision to open an embassy in Bern, describing it as a significant political impetus for expanding and enriching the bilateral agenda.
The sides also exchanged views on developments in the South Caucasus and the Middle East.
Mirzoyan presented steps aimed at further institutionalizing the peace established between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
He also highly appreciated Switzerland’s support for strengthening Armenia’s democratic institutions, as well as its assistance in addressing humanitarian issues and the needs of refugees displaced from Karabakh.
The parties also exchanged views on other issues of mutual interest.
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Armenian Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Arsen Torosyan met with Diene Keita, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in New York, the ministry said.
The sides discussed the results of joint work in the fields of demography and gender equality. They also referred to cooperation in developing and implementing pro-family policies and promoting the economic empowerment of women.
During the meeting, the role of the UN Population Fund’s professional and technical assistance in the effective implementation of sectoral reforms was emphasized.
The sides also highlighted the need to exchange experience, organize training courses and implement joint initiatives in the discussed areas.
The parties expressed readiness to make further efforts to deepen cooperation.
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Armenia’s Defense Ministry has denied reports circulating in media and on social platforms claiming that Azerbaijani armed forces have deployed a new military position on the sovereign territory of Armenia.
In a video released by the ministry, spokesperson Aram Torosyan said that in recent days a group of public figures and media outlets had been spreading false information alleging that Azerbaijani forces established a new position on Armenia’s sovereign territory in 2025.
Torosyan urged the public to rely only on official information and not to give in to misinformation.
Details are provided in the video released by the ministry.
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U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the release of 172 million barrels of oil from the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve on Wednesday, after oil prices rocketed to their highest levels in years amid the U.S.’s war with Iran, CBS News reported.
The releases will start next week and take about 120 days, Energy Secretary Christopher Wright said Wednesday in a statement.
The move is part of a coordinated release by the International Energy Agency, whose 32 member countries — mostly U.S. allies — announced earlier Wednesday they would let 400 million barrels of oil flow out of their emergency reserves.
Wright said the U.S. plans to replenish the reserve with 200 million barrels of oil “within the next year.”
CBS News quoted Trump as saying at a press briefing that after the reserve is tapped, “we’ll fill it up.”
The benchmark U.S. crude oil price, West Texas Intermediate, was trading at just over $92 per barrel as of Wednesday evening at 8:15 p.m. ET. Prices had climbed about 7.2% over the course of the day and were largely unchanged following the announcement of a Strategic Petroleum Reserve release, which was widely expected, according to CBS News.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve — stored in massive underground caverns in Texas and Louisiana — held about 415 million barrels as of last week, CBS News reported citing government figures. In total, the IEA says its members have more than 1.2 billion barrels in their reserves.
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The United Nations Security Council adopted a draft resolution condemning Iran’s attacks on Gulf countries and Jordan, demanding that Tehran immediately halt hostilities, Al Jazeera reported.
Thirteen of the 15 members of the UNSC voted on Wednesday in favor of the resolution sponsored by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and cosponsored by an extraordinary 135 other UN member states.
No countries voted against the draft.
Both China and Russia abstained but notably decided not to use their veto power to block this resolution.
The resolution condemns Iran’s attacks, demands an immediate halt to hostilities, and deplores Tehran’s targeting of infrastructure such as ports and energy facilities in the Gulf region.
After the vote, Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir-Saeid Iravani addressed the Council, expressing his “profound regret” at the adoption of the resolution.
“This is a deeply regrettable day for the Security Council and for the international community. Today’s adoption is a serious setback to the Council’s credibility and leaves a lasting stain on its record,” Al Jazeera quoted Iravani as saying.
“Today’s action represents a blatant misuse of the Security Council mandate,” he said, blasting the United States for its “barbaric war against the Iranian people” and for starting the conflict, including killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“This resolution is a manifest injustice against my country, the main victim of a clear act of aggression. It distorts the realities on the ground and deliberately ignores the root causes of the current crisis,” Iravani said, accusing the US and Israel of being behind the resolution.
Iravani also said more than 1,348 civilians have been killed and more than 17,000 injured since the US and Israel launched their attack on February 28, including the “massacre of 170 schoolgirls in Minab”.
More than 19,000 civilian sites, including residential homes and hospitals, have also been damaged, he added.
Addressing the council, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said his country abstained from the vote on the draft resolution “because it was extremely unbalanced” and would not fulfil the purpose “of meeting international peace and security”.
“We regret the situation that Middle Eastern countries find themselves in. Moreover, we think it unacceptable to strike civilian infrastructure of Arab states in the Gulf,” Nebenzia said.
China’s ambassador to the UN Zhang Jun told the council that the conflict had “neither legitimacy nor legal basis” and the US and Israel must cease their attacks to prevent further deterioration of the regional situation.
The UNSC also voted, but failed to pass, a draft resolution put forward by Moscow on Wednesday that called on all sides to cease military action in the Middle East.
The U.S. and Israel launched what they described as a pre-emptive strike against Iran on February 28, claiming that Tehran was developing a nuclear weapon and posing a threat—an allegation Iran has denied. In response, Iran launched counterattacks, firing missiles and drones at Israel, as well as at U.S. assets and other targets across the Middle East.
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The lack of any meaningful economic relationship with Iran predetermined that most countries would support any resolution against it if unofficially forced to choose between the Islamic Republic and the Gulf Kingdoms to whom they’re dependent to some degree on energy imports.
The UNSC just adopted a resolution condemning Iran for its attacks against the Gulf Kingdoms, including against civilian and residential areas, after Russia and China abstained just like they abstained from last fall’s resolution on Gaza due to their Arab partners’ support for these two measures. Russia proposed a second draft that its permanent representative said was “aimed at urgently de-escalating the situation… (and is) simple, direct and unequivocal, and intentionally does not name any parties to the conflict.”
The US predictably vetoed it, hence why Russia and China then felt compelled to abstain from the initial draft, but this nevertheless showed that Russia did its best to support Iran at the UNSC. As for the resolution that ultimately passed, it was backed by a whopping 135 countries, which Al Jazeera’s corresponded described as “the largest number of countries ever to cosponsor a Security Council draft resolution.” The reasons for this historic condemnation of Iran are pretty straightforward.
Simply put, most of the world is dependent to some degree on energy imports from the Gulf Kingdoms, while Iran provides pretty much nothing to most of them since few apart from China are willing to defy the US’ secondary sanctions threats by significantly trading with it. They therefore stand to lose much more from the disruption of Gulf Kingdoms’ energy exports caused by Iran’s attacks against them than from the joint US-Israel campaign against Iran that’s devastating the Islamic Republic.
The international community’s lack of any meaningful economic relationship with Iran at the start of the Third Gulf War sharply contrasts with the relationship that they had with Russia at the start of NATO’s proxy war on it through Ukraine that entered its most intense phase four years ago. Back then and still to this day to a large extent, many of them were dependent to some degree on its agricultural, energy, and/or fertilizer exports, ergo why they all in some way defied the US’ secondary sanctions threats.
Even though most of the international community voted to condemn Russia at the UNGA, they all still retained some level of their commodity imports from it, including the EU. They and their US patron did agree to a so-called “price cap” for limiting Russia’s oil profits, but the point is that even they acknowledged that the world could not continue to function if these exports were instantly cut off. The US has since tried to wean everyone off of them, but this is no longer possible amidst the global oil crisis.
In any case, this insight enables one to retrospectively conclude that the World Majority’s defiance of the US’ secondary sanctions threats vis-à-vis maintaining trade with Russia was driven by their self-interests, not by their collective commitment to some nebulous multipolar principle. Likewise, the same goes for why most of them just condemned Iran at the UN by cosponsoring the latest Security Council Resolution, which was also in their interests to do no matter how much it disappointed some multipolar enthusiasts.
At the end of the day, the lack of any meaningful economic relationship with Iran predetermined that the majority of the world would support any resolution against it if unofficially forced to choose between the Islamic Republic and the Gulf Kingdoms to whom they’re dependent to some degree on energy imports. This is the cold reality of International Relations, which is an unpleasant reminder to the well-intentioned activists who want to change the way that the world works that this is a lot easier said than done.
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U.S. President Donald Trump said U.S. forces have hit 28 Iranian minelaying ships as of Wednesday.
“They started talking about mines, so we hit 28 mine ships as of this moment,” CBS News quoted Trump as saying while touring a pharmaceutical company in Cincinnati.
U.S. officials had told CBS News that Iran may have been preparing to use naval mines in the key Strait of Hormuz off the Iranian coast.
A reporter asked President Trump on the White House South Lawn Wednesday what more needs to happen militarily for the operation in Iran to end.
“More of the same,” the president responded. “And we’ll see how that all comes out. Right now, they’ve lost their navy, they’ve lost their air force, they have no anti-aircraft apparatus at all. They have no radar. Their leaders are gone. And we could do a lot worse.”
When he was asked about the latest reporting suggesting the U.S. may be at fault for the deadly strike at a school in Iran, the president said, “I don’t know about it.”
Iran said that 170 schoolgirls were killed in a school in Minab in a U.S. Tomahawk strike on the first day of the military operations. The U.S. said it would investigate. Initially, the U.S. president suggested to reporters that Iran might be behind it. But Reuters, CBS News and New York Times reported that a preliminary military investigation into the bombing of the elementary school found the U.S. was likely responsible.
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Citigroup and Standard Chartered have begun evacuating their Dubai offices, telling staff to work from home instead, Reuters reported citing sources on Wednesday, as banks step up precautions after Iran threatened Gulf banking interests linked to the U.S. and Israel.
U.S. financial giant Citigroup told its staff to evacuate offices in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Dubai’s Oud Metha neighbourhood, a memo sent to employees which was seen by Reuters shows, telling them to work from home until further notice.
Britain’s StanChart has a large presence in the United Arab Emirates, with Dubai now a major financial hub for leading international lenders including JPMorgan and HSBC, as well as law firms and asset managers. Separately, HSBC has closed all branches in Qatar until further notice, according to a customer notice, saying the measure was to ensure the safety of staff and customers, Reuters reported.
The moves came after a spokesperson for Tehran’s Khatam al-Anbiya military command headquarters said on Wednesday that Iran will target economic and banking interests linked to the U.S. and Israel in the region, after an attack on an Iranian bank.
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“Fact” daily writes:
Recently, the certain passivity of the current authorities and Nikol Pashinyan in the declared war against the Armenian Apostolic Church is extremely obvious. Moreover, Pashinyan participates in liturgies where the name of Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II is not discounted, although he declared weeks ago that it is a matter of principle for him.
According to our sources, not only pre-election “logic” played a role in this “pause” of Pashinyan, but also the survey published by IRI the other day, the results of which the Pashinyan government was familiar with earlier. In particular, according to the results of the survey conducted in February 2026, 61 percent of respondents expressed satisfaction with the Armenian Apostolic Church. Moreover, in June 2025, that figure was 58 percent. This proves that the anti-church campaign of the current authorities, the use of law enforcement “instruments” against the clergy and other pressures do not produce the desired results of Pashinyan, even on the contrary.
According to the information we have, this does not mean that Pashinyan has stopped the anti-church campaign. On the contrary, according to our sources, they have now started working “underneath”, specifically following the financial movements of the AAP, finding “dirt”, in short, collecting tangible “files” in order to attack the Church with new force when needed.
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