Beniamin Matevosyan: Pashinyan is confusing Armenia’s security guarantors with his own personal guarantors

(On the real war party)

Today’s political reality in Armenia resembles a dangerous trap in which the ruling authorities have turned the threat of foreign aggression into their primary electoral asset. Rather than offering the nation a strategy for development or stronger defenses, Nikol Pashinyan’s government has effectively become a “mailbox” for Baku’s ultimatums. As MPs Anna Grigoryan and Kristine Vardanyan have rightly observed, we are witnessing an unprecedented situation: the authorities are not making promises — they are frightening their own people with the specter of impending war, wielding Ilham Aliyev’s name as a tool of psychological pressure on voters.

The logic of “either I stay in power or there will be war” lays bare a profound crisis of trust and raises the question of whose interests the country’s leadership is actually serving — especially given how precisely it claims to know the “day and hour” of a potential enemy attack.

The main deception is this: Pashinyan has conflated Armenia’s security guarantees with his own personal guarantee of remaining in power. The current relative calmness along the borders is not the fruit of shrewd diplomacy or functioning deterrence, it is a temporary pre-election gift from Baku and Ankara. Aliyev and Erdogan have a strong vested interest in keeping the current regime in place, and so they are artificially maintaining a ceasefire through the electoral period, feeding Pashinyan the illusion of a “era of peace.” The prime minister is trying to convince the public that this fragile quiet can outlast the elections, but that is a fatal miscalculation. In reality, this “peace” is little more than a short-term loan that the country will be made to repay the moment the polling stations close.

The reason Armenian authorities are so fervently rejecting the idea of international guarantors today lies in the direct influence of Turkey and Azerbaijan. These players have a vital interest in leaving Armenia to face their demands alone, removing from the equation any mediators capable of imposing legal frameworks or independent oversight. Baku and Ankara have successfully put the rejection of guarantors into the mouths of official Yerevan, laying the groundwork for post-election diktat. Once Pashinyan secures re-election, a sack of demands will be dropped at his door, the one he will no longer be able to ignore: from the handover of enclaves to the de facto abandonment of rearming the national army. Personal security guarantees for one man will come at the cost of dismantling security for the entire state.

Against this backdrop, the “Guaranteed Peace” concept advanced by the opposition stands as the only antidote to the “political toxicosis” gripping Armenian society. A genuine peace cannot hinge on the mood of a neighboring leader or on an endless willingness to hollow out one’s own Constitution. Guaranteed Peace is not simply the presence of peacekeepers, it is a robust system of international legal mechanisms backed by real instruments of accountability. It means constructing a security architecture in which any shift in the balance of power is offset by binding agreements and economic checks, not by new territorial concessions. Only by building a system independent of the will of any single individual can Armenia escape the vicious cycle of perpetual threats and the humiliating wait for yet another “permission to exist” granted by its adversaries.

Think about that…