Armenian citizens get upset and accuse us of still reacting to [ex-presidents] Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan, or the forces they lead. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this in his concluding remarks during Thursday’s National Assembly (NA) session debates on the 2026 state budget draft of Armenia.

“Sometimes citizens say, ‘It sometimes seems that it is a very convenient place for you to get involved in these conversations in order to avoid discussing real problems that exist, to avoid finding solutions for them.’ Indeed, that mess must be resolved, and the way to resolve it is that parliamentary elections will soon take place [next June], and it must be ensured that the forces led by those individuals are not in parliament. If they are, the same situation will continue. The time has come for this problem to be solved,” Pashinyan said.

He noted that an opposition MP accused him of giving high positions in the Armenian Armed Forces to an agent of another country. “That was yesterday. Today he came, from this podium, defended the same person as a persecuted individual. This shows that despite certain personal issues, they are simply in the same status, receiving instructions from the same place about whom to protect and whom not to.

In these [parliamentary] elections [in June], this problem must be solved, because, as we can infer from those same speeches and sequence of events, these political forces and their leaders are similar, supposedly, agents of influence of another country in the Republic of Armenia. And these discussions entirely show that.

And I want us to speak from this podium about Armenia in 2018 and 2025, because those people, supposedly agents of another country’s influence, want to instill disgust, disdain, contempt toward today’s Republic of Armenia,” Nikol Pashinyan stated.

He spoke about the differences between Armenia in 2018 and today. “As of 2018, Armenia was in the ‘pocket’ of that same country whose agents are the individuals I listed. Today, Armenia is an independent state, not only an independent state, but Armenia has a center of sovereign will and can make decisions,” the PM said.