Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the daily digest of Armenia-related top news as of 11.03.21:

  • The Armenian President has returned—along with his respective objections—the proposal of the Prime Minister to appoint Artak Davtyan as Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Armenia, the President's Office reports.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Wednesday submitted a petition to President Sarkissian to appoint Artak Davtyan to the aforesaid position.

The two-week confrontation between the government and the armed forces entered a new phase on Wednesday. The Prime Minister's Office announced that Onik Gasparyan is legally dismissed from the post of Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces following Gasparyan's demand for PM Nikol Pashinyan's resignation.

President Armen Sarkissian on Wednesday invited Pashinyan, the heads of the parliamentary factions, and the leaders of the Homeland Salvation Movement—which demands Pashinyan’s resignation—to a meeting on Saturday to discuss the situation in Armenia and find mutually acceptable solutions to overcome the current crisis in the country.

As of Thursday afternoon, only a Bright Armenia political force responds to President's invitation yet.

  • The Administrative Court of Armenia has scheduled a hearing for April 29 on the case of Tiran Khachatryan, now former First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces.

Khachatryan demands to invalidate the President's decree, according to which he was relieved of his aforesaid position.

The respondent in the case is President Armen Sarkissian himself.

Also, the Prime Minister's Office and the Army General Staff are included in this case as third parties.

  • The search operations for the bodies of the fallen soldiers and the missing people are being carried out by two rescue squads in the Hadrut and Varanda regions of Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh].

As a result of this work being carried out since the ceasefire in November 2020, a total of 1,496 dead bodies—six of which, on Wednesday—have been retrieved from the Artsakh territories now under the control of Azerbaijan.

  • Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says he and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov discussed bilateral ties and the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Syria during their talks in Doha, TASS reports.

Cavusoglu said Ankara’s aim is to reach the pre-pandemic indicators in the tourism sector and recalled that the ceremony marking the launch of construction of the third energy bloc of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant in Mersin.

  • 748 new cases of the coronavirus were confirmed in Armenia, and the total number of these cases has reached 176,286 in the country.

Also, two more deaths from COVID-19 were registered, making the respective total 3,239 cases.

The process of vaccinating medical workers in Armenia against the coronavirus has already begun, Romella Abovyan, head of the Epidemiology Department of Nosocomial Infections of the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a briefing.

According to her, medical workers are vaccinated against the coronavirus as a priority, as they are considered to be people working on the “frontlines” and a high-risk group.

It measured magnitude 5 to 6 at the epicenter, which 95 km from the state border of Armenia

The seismic activity was also felt in the towns of Agarak, Meghri, Kajaran, Kapan, Goris, and Sisian of Armenia’s Syunik Province—and with magnitude 2 to 3.

Levon Aronian will play in his first tournament ever since his decision to no longer represent Armenia.

The Armenian chess grandmaster, however, will not represent the US in this tournament yet.