The Armenian political crisis started in 2020 with the Azerbaijani offensive against the self-declared Republic of Artsakh which triggered mass protests in Armenia. The crisis escalated after the Russian peacekeeping force were not involved in the third war leaving Armenia isolated. The war ended with the expulsion of more than 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. There had been multiple coup plots during the crisis. As of December 2023, parts of Armenia remains under Azerbaijani occupation.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War and the 2023 Expulsion of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, Nikol Pashinyan's approval rating has plummeted from 82 percent in August 2018 to 11.5 percent as of 6 May 2025, one of the lowest approval ratings of any world leader.
Background
On 21 September 1991, Armenia officially declared its statehood after the failed August coup in Moscow, RSFSR. Since independence Armenia has been engaged in hostilities with their neighbor Azerbaijan due to Nagorno-Karabakh an autonomous region of Azerbaijan almost wholly populated by ethnic Armenians including the city of Stepanakert, a significant Armenian cultural center due to it being the birthplace of the Karabakh movement.
Fearing further ethnic cleansing under an independent Turkic and Muslim Azerbaijan, Armenian separatists rose up and formed the Republic of Artsakh, propped up by the Armenian military, which engaged in a direct conflict with Azerbaijan, the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. Despite Soviet support and extensive Turkish volunteers, Azerbaijan lost, with Artsakh expanding to include the ethnically mixed border territories between them and Armenia.
In February 1998 Armenia's first President; Levon Ter-Petrosyan, resigned following mass protests against his rule for negotiating with Azerbaijan to demarcate their border, which would've seen both sides give up occupied villages, with protesters arguing that any cession of territory would be a betrayal of Armenia. Afterwards the new Armenian government moved slowly, but steadily, in a pro-Russian direction until the 2008 Armenian presidential election. Mired by voter fraud, the Russophile Serzh Sargsyan was quickly declared winner. Supporters of Ter-Petrosyan, who had returned to politics and came in second place in the election, led protests 250,000 strong through February, that eventually waned to just 1,000 by March 1, when Armenian security forces used live ammunition to disperse a crowd, killing 10. Shortly afterwards Ter-Petrosyan would be arrested. Sargsyan and his Republican Party would force through sweeping reforms that rolled back Democracy, culminating in changing the constitution in 2015 via another rigged vote to effectively abolish term limits by largely shifting the powers of President to the Prime Minister.
Armenia would remain a stringent Russian ally, with supporters of Democracy increasingly oppressed, and corrupt government-tied oligarchs rising in prominence, much like the system Putin created in Russia. In 2018 a protest against judicial corruption snowballed when Sargsyan announced he would be seeking another "re-election" as Prime Minister. The Way Out Alliance quickly grew to become a broad anti-Sargsyan coalition, with Nikol Pashinyan, a newspaper editor who was arrested by the government for "defamation" for criticizing Sargsyan, who went on to form his own centrist Civil Contract party, emerging as the coalitions de facto leader. Pashinyan would personally lead a protest march to block the entrance of the National Assembly until Sargsyan resigned. Sargsyan invited Pashinyan to "negotiations" which lasted 3 minutes, where Sargsyan threatened to send the army in to kill protesters again, as he had done in 2008, before walking out of the meeting. Shortly after Sargsyan stayed true to his word and sent the army to crush the protesters, only for the army to instead side with them. Protesters then blocked the road to the Yerevan airport and border checkpoints with Georgia, to prevent Sargsyan from fleeing the country to Russia. After seven days of occupation of the Assembly Sargsyan resigned and Nikol Pashinyan became prime minister. Russia has described this transfer of power as a coup with Pashinyan calling it a Velvet Revolution.
Pashinyan's rule would quickly be challenged by the entrenched Russophile establishment, especially after one of his first acts as Prime Minister being meeting with the President of Azerbaijan at the 2018 CIS Summit about de-escalation of military tensions, although at this time he had a 91% approval rating. Pashinyan's opponents argued that his naming of allies to key offices instead of "independent" Russophile "technocrats", and his allowing of Western NGOs to enter the country as a threat to the state. Russophile parties attempt to pass a bill which would've largely transferred the government's power back to the President, now a ceremonial office still held by a Sargsyan loyalist. This, coupled with protests calling for the dissolution of the parliament as no election had been held since the revolution would see Pashinyan resign to trigger a snap election which he and his coalition, the My Step Alliance, easily won with 88 seats out of 132.
With Armenia's ally Russia distracted with their invasion of Ukraine, on 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan would suddenly invade Artsakh starting the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. After 44 days of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, Azerbaijan, equipped with modern Turkish NATO equipment and drones, would capture 72% of Republic of Artsakh's territory, including their second largest city Shusha. A Russian backed ceasefire would freeze the conflict along lines of control. The new territorial situation left Artsakh connected to Armenia only through the narrow, poorly defensible Lachin Corridor, with almost 100,000 Armenians fleeting Artsakh. Russia, who didn't intervene in the war in order to draw closer to Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev, and to punish Pashinyan for his western tilt, vowed to station 2,000 peacekeepers along the line of control and in the Lachin Corridor to prevent any further conflict.
Timeline
Aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War
Following the ceasefire with Azerbaijan in November, and despite Artsakh's forces clearly losing the conflict and being on the verge of total collapse, nearly ten thousand protested for the resignation of Pashinyan. There had been as many counter-protests. These protesters where largely split into two groups, Pro-Western nationalists who viewed Pashinyan as too soft on Russia and called for the immediate Armenian ascension to the EU to offer a security guarantee that Russia couldn't provide, and Pro-Russian nationalists, who viewed Pashinyan as a western puppet that surrendered Artsakh to the Azeris that wanted to renew open direct conflict.
During these protests, on 14 November 2020, Armenian security institutions announced that they foiled an assassination attempt on Nikol Pashinyan and a coup attempt detaining former director National Security Service Artur Vanetsyan, former parliamentary leader of the Republican Party Vahram Baghdasaryan and Aschot Minasian. At this time Pashinyan began to blame Artsakh, and by extension Armenia's loss as due to shoddy Russian equipment, arguing that even Russia's premier missile system, the 9K720 Iskander, could do little against Azeri forces in an interview on 23 February. The next day, first deputy chief of the General Staff Tiran Khachatryan responded to Pashinyan's comments with derision, and was sacked hours later. The following day, 25 February 2021, the Chief of the General Staff of Armenian Armed Forces; Onik Gasparyan, read a letter signed by 40 of Armenia's top military staff, stating that the government is "no longer able to make proper decisions in this fateful moment of crisis for the Armenian people" seeking to force through a soft coup, similar to the 1997 Turkish military memorandum.
Pashinyan quickly sacked Gasparyan and called on his supporters to rally in Republic Square to deter the military from staging a violent coup, giving a speech in front of about 60,000 supporters. Armen Sarkissian, the pro-Sargsyan President, blocked Gasparyan's firing with a smaller counter-protest of about 15,000 starting in Yerevan. Gasparyan's firing would be pushed through by the Assembly despite him illegally refusing the order for 8 days he would ultimately step down, with Pashinyan again resigning to trigger snap elections, to see how the general public felt about his governance. Despite the protests and the military's stance, in June 2021, the governing Civil Contract won the parliamentary election again handily, with 71 seats out of 101, defeating the pro-Russian Armenia Alliance bloc of former president Robert Kocharyan.
On February 22, 2022, Russia and Azerbaijan signed "The Declaration on Allied Interaction between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation" resurrecting an alliance and friendly relations between the two countries, despite Azerbaijan being actively hostile to Russia's ally Armenia. Due to Russia's support for their long-standing geopolitical rival, Armenia began to more seriously look for new allies, namely by buying French howitzers and other military equipment, and also by sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine during the Russian invasion.
In January 2022, President Armen Sarkissian unexpectedly resigned. He had previously criticized Pashinyan for not including him in the negotiations with Azerbaijan and Sarkissian gave his lack of authority in foreign and domestic politics as the reason for his resignation. On 3 March 2022, Vahagn Khachaturyan was elected president backed by Civil Contract. He used to be member of Pashinyan's former Impeachment Union and was not supported by the opposition factions.
Protests resumed from April to June against the ceasefire with Azerbaijan, urging Pashinyan to either resume the war, or to resign, largely led by the Armenia Alliance, a coalition led by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), one of the most avowed Russophile parties in the country. The ARF was able to form a broad coalition of pro-Russian parties; dubbed the "Resistance Movement" to also participate in the protests. Although barricades would be erected, and over 250 protesters arrested, the protests eventually fizzled out, with the camp-city on France Square, the protest's headquarters, being dismantled by the protesters on 16 June.
Lachin blockade
The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War resurrected the Armenia–Azerbaijan border crisis as the two nations have never properly demarkated their borders, with both sides claiming villages the other controls, and controlling villages the other claims. On May 12, 2021, Azerbaijani forces crossed several kilometers into Armenian territory in the provinces of Syunik and Gegharkunik, occupying some 215 square kilometres (83 sq mi). This incursion would lead to sporadic clashes along the entire border, resulting in at least 300 deaths during the heaviest of the fighting in September 2022.
Armenia, being directly attacked this time instead of their proxy Artsakh, triggered Article 4 of the Collective Security Treaty Organization on 13 September 2022, which should have had all CSTO member nations come to their military aid. But Russia, still preoccupied with their invasion of Ukraine, and upset with Pashinyan's western tilt, refused not only to aid their ally, but also refused to even condemn Azerbaijan's actions, which by this point included claiming most, if not all, of Armenia as "Western Azerbaijan". During the fighting the Russian peacekeepers, sent to stop specifically what was happening, again stood aside and did nothing to stop Azerbaijani forces, who proceeded to occupy the Lachin corridor, the only road still into Artsakh from Armenia.
In November 2022, the National Democratic Pole protested for Armenia's withdrawal from the CSTO due to the perceived betrayal of Armenia by the block, arguing that Russia could no longer fulfill its purpose as Armenia's security guarantor, instead seeking to replace that role with France and the European Union.