Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan touched upon live on his Facebook page this year’s Armenian Genocide commemorations, noting that the Armenian authorities were guided by the "crisis as an opportunity" thesis.

"We were saying that we should look at this [current COVID-19] crisis as an opportunity, and the brightest and most memorable expression of this theoretical thesis was on April 24," he said, in particular. "We were all faced with a very difficult situation when the 105th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide victims was approaching, and at the same time the epidemic was spreading in Armenia.

We were in a dire situation, thinking about how to prohibit the citizens of Armenia, and people in general, from climbing to Tsitsernakaberd [Hill where the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan is located]; it seemed like an unimaginable thing. On the other hand, how could it be allowed to know that as a result, we will have not a few dozen, but several hundred cases of coronavirus per day, and in general, the situation will certainly get out of control. It was here that we decided to be guided by the thesis of 'using the crisis as an opportunity.' We set a goal that if this is the case, then we should somehow use our minds to organize our events in such a way that it is even more visible and more powerful in terms of emphasizing and transmitting our national messages.

Of course, when we were discussing these ideas, we did not know whether it would work or not, whether we would be able to be come clear to our society, our people, the Diaspora or not. But we were guided by the ‘crisis as an opportunity’ thesis.

What happened? We told about us, our story without an uproar, we commemorated very loudly, audibly, visibly, but without lament. We looked at ourselves from a different perspective, and I'm sure we all liked that image of ours because we realized that we are such a nation, such a people.

I believe we set a new civilizational yardstick for ourselves, to tell about ourselves, to present ourselves.”