The Strong Armenia party spawned recently by the Mer Dzevov (In Our Way) movement is expected to be one of the main opposition contenders in the elections scheduled for June 7. The HAK publicly signaled an interest in forming an electoral alliance with it in late December. According to its deputy chairman, Levon Zurabian, negotiations between the two political groups are still going on.

“Our approaches were presented, naturally to Samvel Karapetian’s team as well,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “The conversation is ongoing, let’s see where we get to.”

Ter-Petrosian has lavished praise on Karapetian in a series of social media posts which observers believe underlined the HAK’s desire to team up with the new opposition heavyweight. The 81-year-old ex-president effectively endorsed the Russian-Armenian tycoon on March 2. He went on to claim that the West will try hard to prevent the Karapetian-led opposition from winning the elections and to help Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian hold on to power.

“Pashinian’s Western masters will consider Samvel Karapetian’s victory as a re-establishment of Russian influence in Armenia, which is not at all part of their long-term plans,” he wrote. “Therefore, they will try to do everything to thwart such a development, ignoring the fact that the exclusive right to choose their own government belongs to the people.”

Karapetian’s political team has reacted cautiously to these overtures. The tycoon’s nephew and right-hand man, Narek Karapetian, said in December that none of Armenia’s former presidents should govern the country again. Zurabian said at the time that the statement “doesn’t apply to us anymore” because the HAK has officially made clear that Ter-Petrosian will not be its top election candidate.

Zurabian said on Tuesday that the HAK will run in the elections on its own if it fails to form an alliance with Strong Armenia or other opposition forces. Ter-Petrosian’s party did so in the last polls held in 2021, failing to win any parliament seats.

Ter-Petrosian, who had led Armenia to independence in 1991, is a vocal critic of Pashinian, having branded the latter as a “nation-destroying scourge” in the wake of Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. He has repeatedly denounced Pashinian’s attempts to depose Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, prompting insults from the ruling Civil Contract party.

Karapetian was arrested and indicted just hours after criticizing Pashinian’s campaign last June. He was moved to house arrest in late December.

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In a statement to the official Armenpress news agency, Armenia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS) said they are being told to take financial, “organizational” and other actions for that purpose. The FIS did not name that country or Armenian opposition groups allegedly supported by the foreign power. Nor did it give other details.

The Interior Ministry said a few hours later that that the Armenian police have already looked into the FIS statement and submitted a relevant “report of an apparent crime” to another law-enforcement agency, the Investigative Committee. The latter declined to say whether it has launched a formal criminal investigation and identified any suspects.

A deputy chairman of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party hinted, meanwhile, that Russia is the source of the alleged meddling in the elections scheduled for June 7. Vahagn Aleksanian claimed that Armenians living abroad will be ordered to travel to their home country to vote in the polls.

Pashinian himself spoke at the weekend of rumors that “they will be bringing people from Russia” to vote for the opposition.

“Let them bring [such people] because 84.5 percent of those who will come, according to the polls we have conducted there, will vote for us,” he said during a campaign trip to Gyumri.

The allegations came almost one month after Pashinian’s government formally asked the European Union to send a “hybrid rapid response team” to Armenian ahead of the elections. The EU seems intent on deploying such a mission to counter possible Russian interference.

Yerevan’s request added to Armenian opposition concerns about the freedom and fairness of the vote. Opposition leaders say that under the guise of countering Russian “hybrid threats,” Pashinian is trying to secure an EU blank check for winning it through fraud or foul play.

The EU sent a similar mission in Moldova during parliamentary elections held there last September. Two Moldovan opposition parties deemed pro-Russian were barred from running in the elections won by the former Soviet republic’s pro-Western leadership. Armenian opposition groups fear that some of them may likewise be disqualified from the race with the EU’s backing.

In recent weeks, senior members of Pashinian’s party have signaled concerns that three such groups led by former President Robert Kocharian, Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetian and another wealthy businessman, Gagik Tsarukian, may collectively win a majority in the next Armenian parliament and form a coalition government. They have said that the Armenian authorities “will not allow” such an outcome.

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Vance and his wife Usha visited the memorial at the end of an official trip to the Armenian capital on February 10. After they laid flowers by its eternal fire dedicated to the victims of the 1915 genocide, Gzoyan escorted them to other parts of the complex, including cross-stones placed in memory of Armenians killed in pogroms in Azerbaijan that followed the outbreak of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

According to an AGMI press release, Gzoyan noted “the connection between those events and the Armenian Genocide.” She went on to present Vance with “books about the Armenian Genocide and the Artsakh issue.”

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, who stopped using the Armenian name of Karabakh a few years ago, indicated his dissatisfaction with the organization of Vance’s visit to the memorial when he spoke in the Armenian parliament later in February.

“There happened things that should not have happened, but that’s a topic for another conversation,” he said without elaborating.

Gzoyan tendered her resignation aftewards. According to some media outlets, the Armenian government ordered her to step down because of what she told and showed Vance.

Gzoyan has still not publicly commented on her decision which has upset the 74 other employees of the AGMI. They protested against her exit in a joint letter to Pashinian.

“It was the first time in the history of our museum that all employees, without exception, appealed to a higher authority,” Mihran Minasian, an adviser to the AGMI director, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday.

“We expected that our director will on the contrary be rewarded for her good work,” said Suren Manukian, who runs one of the AGMI divisions.

Manukian said he and his colleagues were unofficially informed by the Armenian Ministry of Education, Culture and Youth Affairs, which supervises the AGMI, that Gzoyan was told to quit because of failing to ensure proper oversight of a controversial reconstruction of the genocide memorial that began last summer. He dismissed that explanation as “unserious,” arguing that the reconstruction work is directly overseen by the ministry.

Education Minister Zhanna Andreasian has personally inspected it during her regular visits to the site. Gzoyan no longer accompanied her during those inspections after Vance’s visit.

Andreasian’s ministry on Tuesday declined to give a reason for Gzoyan’s resignation, saying that it will only reply to written questions from RFE/RL’s Armenian Service later on. It also noted that the AGMI’s director is appointed by its board of trustees.

The board’s chairman, French-Armenian genocide scholar Raymond Kevorkian, and several members resigned last week. Pashinian promptly replaced them on March 6.

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