China says US is the true 'empire of lies'.
The United States is the true "empire of lies", the Chinese foreign ministry said on Saturday, lashing out at a U.S. State Department report that accused Beijing of ploughing billions of dollars annually into information manipulation efforts.

China is manipulating global media through censorship, data harvesting and covert purchases of foreign news outlets, the U.S. State Department said in the report on Thursday.

Despite the unprecedented resources devoted to the campaign, Beijing had hit "major setbacks" when targeting democratic countries, due to local media and civil society push-back, according to the report, which was produced under a congressional mandate to detail state information manipulation.

The report has disregarded facts, and is itself false information, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement.

The agencies of the U.S. State Department that produced the report "were the source of false information and the command post of 'cognitive warfare'," the Chinese ministry said.

"Facts have repeatedly proven that the United States is the true 'empire of lies'," it added.

The U.S. report comes amid controversy over China's attempts in recent years to increase the global footprint of its government-controlled media. Beijing is seeking to combat the negative images of China it feels are propagated by global media.

China slams U.S. report on Beijing's 'global information manipulation'
China on Saturday slammed American accusations that Beijing has spent billions of dollars on creating a global "disinformation" network, calling the United States an "empire of lies."

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said a report issued Friday by the U.S. State Department on how the communist nation is seeking to "reshape the global information environment to its advantage" is itself disinformation.

Citing what it called "the enormous lie made up to smear" China's policies regarding its Uygher minority in the northwestern Xinjiang province, the ministry said Washington's assertions about a Chinese "propaganda ecosystem" show that the United States "is an 'empire of lies' through and through."

"Even some in the U.S., such as Senator Rand Paul, acknowledged that the U.S. government is the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world," the statement said.

Paul, a Tennessee Republican, asserted during a May 2022 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, "Do you know [who] the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government."

The comments came while he was questioning Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas about the department's proposed Disinformation Governance Board, which was intended to oversee and safeguard the United States from disinformation threats abroad but was later dropped.

China has cited Paul's comments in several contexts since then in its disagreements with U.S. policies, including this week's State Department report on Chinese disinformation campaigns.

The report found that China's "information manipulation efforts" are composed of five primary features including international propaganda, domestic censorship, promoting "digital authoritarianism," pressuring international organizations and exercising control over Chinese-language media.

"These five elements enable Beijing to bend the global information environment to its advantage," the authors wrote. "If successful, the PRC's efforts could transform the global information landscape, creating biases and gaps that lead nations to make decisions that subordinate their economic and security interests to Beijing's."

In its Saturday response, Chinese officials said it is rather the United States that has "invented the weaponizing of the global information space."

"Some in the U.S. may think that they can prevail in the information war as long as they produce enough lies," the foreign ministry spokesperson said. "But the people of the world are not blind."

Scientists have found a population of people in Africa‘s Namib desert that were believed to have disappeared 50 years ago. Anthropologists initially believed that the community disappeared when the languages spoken in the region died out. However, experts are now realizing that this group kept its genetic identity when their native language disappeared.

The Kwepe, one of the groups in southern Africa’s Namib Desert, spoke the Kwadi language.

“Kwadi was a click-language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across Southern Africa,” said researcher Anne-Maria Fehn, according to SciTechDaily.

Through DNA research, experts found the descendants of the people who spoke Kwadi. The team also traced Bantu-speaking and other groups whose language was believed to be lost.

The team of researchers included scientists from the University of Bern in Switzerland, as well as the University of Porto in Portugal and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. According to the researchers, the Kwadi-speaking descendants share a common ancestry, which is only found in groups from the Namib desert.

“Previous studies revealed that foragers from the Kalahari desert descend from an ancestral population who was the first to split from all other extant humans. Our results consistently place the newly identified ancestry within the same ancestral lineage but suggest that the Namib-related ancestry diverged from all other southern African ancestries, followed by a split of northern and southern Kalahari ancestries,” said researcher Mark Stoneking.

The people who spoke Kwadi started speaking Bantu languages more recently, scientists said.

“A lot of our efforts were placed in understanding how much of this local variation and global eccentricity was caused by genetic drift — a random process that disproportionately affects small populations — and by admixtures from vanished populations,” said researcher Dr. Sandra Oliveira from the University of Bern.

‘Centuries of history lost’: Armenians describe journey to safety after fall of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Terrified families fleeing in fear of ethnic cleansing after the collapse of Nagorno-Karabakh are running out of water and fuel during the desperate two-day journey to neighbouring Armenia.

More than 90,000 Karabakh Armenians – around three-quarters of the total population – have now left their homes in the breakaway enclave, which is internationally recognised as being part of Azerbaijan.

The United Nations fears the fall of the region could mean there will eventually be no Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh, prompting concerns of ethnic cleansing. It is the largest exodus of people in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The breakaway area – also known by Armenians as Artsakh – had enjoyed de facto independence for three decades before Azerbaijan launched a lightning military operation earlier this month. It forced separatist forces to lay down their weapons and agree to formally dissolve the breakaway government.

Fearing reprisals, as Baku’s forces moved into the main cities and arrested Armenian officials, hungry and scared families packed what few belongings they could into cars and trucks and left their homes for good.

Valeri, 17, fled the village of Kichan, 70km (43 miles) north of the Armenian border with his family and neighbours. In total, they squeezed 35 people into a Ford Transit and made the four-day journey to safety, sitting on top of each other and sleeping in shifts.

Families hitched lifts on the back of trucks as they fled Nagorno-Karabakh (Handout)
Families hitched lifts on the back of trucks as they fled Nagorno-Karabakh (Handout)
“We couldn’t take anything with us because the shelling was too intense as we escaped,” he told The Independent.

They had to hide in a large waste water pipe to escape artillery fire, he said. In the chaos, families were separated and the poor mobile coverage in the mountainous regions means they are still trying to reconnect.

His family has been forced to move six times since the early 1990s and, like so many Armenians, find themselves homeless again.

“I don’t think it’s possible to go back to Kichan, even if we could go back everything will be wrecked or stolen,” he said.

Others described a 40km (25 miles) stretch of hairpin road to Armenia at a near standstill, with some vehicles breaking down for a lack of fuel. In the lead-up to Azerbaijan’s operation, Baku had imposed a 10-month blockade on the enclave leading to chronic shortages of food and petrol supplies.

“All you can see is a sea of cars stretching to the horizon, people are cooking by the side of the road,” said Gev Iskajyan, 31, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of Artsakh, as he arrived exhausted in the Armenian capital Yerevan. He fled the region’s main city Stepanakert, or Khankendi as it is known in Azerbaijan, fearing he could be arrested if he stayed.

“Resources are so scarce there, people are running out of water and fuel on the road along the way out. If anything happens to children and the elderly, no one can get to them. Ambulances can’t move,” he told The Independent.

He said most families believed they would not ever be able to return home and that this was the end of Armenian presence.

“It weighs heavy. Nagorno-Karabakh isn’t just a place, it is a culture, it has its own dialect,” he said. “You look at the people in the back of trucks, they have to fit their entire life in a single box, they can’t bring everything, they can’t go back, it breaks your heart.

“It is centuries of history lost.”

Nagorno-Karabakh isn’t just a place, it is a culture, it has its own dialect

Gev Iskajyan, an Armenian advocate who fled to Yerevan

The centuries-old conflict that has raged through the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh remains the longest-running in post-Soviet Eurasia.

The 4,400-square-kilometre territory (1,700 square-miles) is officially part of Azerbaijan but after a bloody war following the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s, the region’s Armenian-majority population enjoyed state-like autonomy and status.

That changed in 2020 when Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, launched a military offensive and took back swathes of territory in a six-week conflict that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. Russia, which supports Armenia, brokered a tense cessation of hostilities.

But that was broken earlier this month when Baku launched a 24-hour blitz which proved too much for Armenian separatist forces, who are outgunned and outnumbered. They agreed to lay down their weapons and dissolve the entire enclave.

Residents still left in Nagorno-Karabakh told The Independent that Azerbaijani forces and police entered the main city.

“People are intensively fleeing after the forces entered, and took over the governmental buildings,” said one man who asked not to be named over concerns for his safety.

Baku has also detained prominent Armenians as they attempted to flee, prompting fears more arrests may follow. Among them was Ruben Vardanyan, a billionaire investment banker, who served as the head of Karabakh’s separatist government between November 2022 and February this year.

On Friday, Russian state media reported that the Azerbaijani military had also detained former separatist commander Levon Mnatsakanyan as he also tried to escape. He led the army of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh from 2015 to 2018.

The UN, meanwhile, said they were readying themselves for as many as 120,000 refugees to flood into Armenia, a third of them children.

“The major concern for us is that many of them have been separated from their family,” said Regina De Dominicis, regional director of the UN’s child agency.

Kavita Belani, UNHCR representative in Armenia, said: “This is a situation where they’ve lived under nine months of blockade. When they come in, they’re full of anxiety, they’re scared, they’re frightened and they want answers.”

Former official says 'almost no Armenians left' in Nagorno-Karabakh region.
A former top official of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Eastern Europe said Saturday almost none of its ethnic Armenian population remains following a mass wave of migration of more than 100,000 people.

Artak Beglaryan, the region's former state minister, said in a social media post that the enclave "is almost fully empty with at most a few hundred people remaining, who are also leaving."

Tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh following a military operation conducted by Azerbaijan to recapture the area, officials confirmed Friday.

Roughly 88,000 of them crossed the border into Armenia in less than a week, the United Nations said Friday, accounting for more than 80% of the Armenian population in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which shares a border with Azerbaijan.

Approximately 120,000 ethnic Armenians called the region home.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan says more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians have fled the Nagorno-Karabakh region following a military operation conducted by Azerbaijan to recapture the area.
A majority of those coming into Armenia do have family there, while approximately 32,000 require government accommodation, according to the Armenian Prime Minister's Office.

The UN is sending a team of observers to the region.

President Ilham Aliyev's government last week launched a military operation to retake the 1,700-square-mile territory in the name of Azerbaijan. The breakaway republic was formed in 1994 following a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia and has seen several military conflicts over the years.

Azerbaijan will now formally dissolve the republic, prompting thousands of ethnic Armenians to immediately flee across the border back into Armenia, which has a total population of 2.8 million.

The region itself is located in the South Caucasus, in the Lesser Caucasus mountain range.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in a speech last Sunday warned of the possibility of ethnic cleansing, but Aliyev has denied any hint of the practice and publicly stated he will guarantee the safety of Armenians choosing to remain in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia seeks EU aid for refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh, Italy says.
Armenia has asked the European Union for assistance to help it deal with refugees arriving from Nagorno-Karabakh since Azerbaijan took back control of the region last week, the office of Italy's prime minister said on Saturday.

Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but is populated mainly by Armenian Christians who set up the self-styled Republic of Artsakh three decades ago after a bloody ethnic conflict as the Soviet Union collapsed.

More than 100,000 refugees have arrived in Armenia since Azerbaijan launched a military operation to retake control of Nagorno-Karabakh, the head of the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said late on Friday.

Armenia has asked the EU for temporary shelters and medical supplies, the Italian prime minister's office said in a statement, adding that Rome working to promote stabilisation in the region.

Almost all of Nagorno-Karabakh's people have left, Armenia's government says.
An ethnic Armenian exodus has nearly emptied Nagorno-Karabakh of residents since Azerbaijan attacked and ordered the breakaway region’s militants to disarm, the Armenian government said Saturday.

Nazeli Baghdasaryan, the press secretary to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, said that 100,480 people had arrived in Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh, which had a population of around 120,000 before Azerbaijan reclaimed the region in a lightning offensive last week.

A total of 21,076 vehicles had crossed the Hakari Bridge, which links Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, since last week, Baghdasaryan said. Some lined up for days because the winding mountain road that is the only route to Armenia became jammed.

The departure of more than 80% of Nagorno-Karabakh's population raises questions about Azerbaijan’s plans for the enclave, which was internationally recognized as part of its territory. The region's separatist ethnic Armenian government said Thursday it would dissolve itself by the end of the year after a three-decade bid for independence.

Pashinyan has alleged the ethnic Armenian exodus amounted to “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing and depriving people of their motherland.” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected the characterization, saying the mass migration by the region's residents was “their personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation.”

In a related development, Azerbaijani authorities on Friday arrested the former foreign minister of Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist government, presidential adviser David Babayan, Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office said Saturday.

Babayan's arrest follows the Azerbaijani border guard's detention of the former head of Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist government, State Minister Ruben Vardanyan, as he tried to cross into Armenia on Wednesday.

The arrests appear to reflect Azerbaijan’s intention to quickly enforce its grip on the region after the military offensive.

During three decades of conflict in the region, Azerbaijan and the separatists backed by Armenia have accused each other of targeted attacks, massacres and other atrocities, leaving people on both sides deeply suspicious and fearful.

While Azerbaijan has pledged to respect the rights of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, most are fleeing because they don’t trust Azerbaijani authorities to treat them humanely or to guarantee them their language, religion and culture.

After six years of separatist fighting ended in 1994 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by Armenia. Then, during a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan took back parts of the region in the south Caucasus Mountains along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had claimed earlier.

In December, Azerbaijan blocked the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, accusing the Armenian government or using it for illicit weapons shipments to the region’s separatist forces.

Weakened by the blockade and with Armenia’s leadership distancing itself from the conflict, ethnic Armenian forces in the region agreed to lay down arms less than 24 hours after Azerbaijan began its offensive. Talks have begun between officials in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist authorities on “reintegrating” the region into Azerbaijan.

More than 80% of Nagorno-Karabakh's population flees as future uncertain for those who remain.
The exodus of more than 80% of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh raises questions about Azerbaijan's plans for the ethnic Armenian enclave following its lightning offensive last week to reclaim the breakaway region.

The Armenian government said Friday evening that more than 97,700 people, from a population of around 120,000, had fled to Armenia since Azerbaijan attacked and ordered the region's militants to disarm. The enclave's separatist government said it would dissolve itself by the end of the year after a three-decade bid for independence.

Some people lined up for days to escape Nagorno-Karabakh because the only route to Armenia — a winding mountain road — became jammed with slow-moving vehicles.

Armenian Health Minister Anahit Avanesyan said some people, including the elderly, had died while on the road to Armenia, because they were “exhausted due to malnutrition, left without even taking medicine with them, and were on the road for more than 40 hours.”

On Thursday, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan alleged that the exodus of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh amounted to “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing and depriving people of their motherland.” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected Pashinyan’s accusations, saying the departure of Armenians was “their personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation.”

Laurence Broers, an expert on the Caucasus with the London-based think tank Chatham House, said it was unlikely that significant numbers of Armenians would remain in Nagorno-Karabakh and that “the territory will become homogenous.”

“If you define ethnic cleansing as actions by force or through intimidation to induce a population to leave, that’s very much what the last year or so has looked like,” he said.

During the three decades of conflict in the region, Azerbaijan and separatists inside Nagorno-Karabakh, alongside allies in Armenia, have accused each other of targeted attacks, massacres and other atrocities, leaving people on both sides deeply suspicious and fearful.

While Azerbaijan has pledged to respect the rights of ethnic Armenians in the region, most are now fleeing, because they don’t believe that Azerbaijani authorities will treat them fairly and humanely or guarantee them their language, religion and culture.

In December, Azerbaijan blocked the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, accusing the Armenian government or using it for illicit weapons shipments to the region’s separatist forces.

Armenia alleged the closure denied basic food and fuel supplies to Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan rejected the accusation, arguing that the region could receive supplies through the Azerbaijani city of Aghdam — a solution long resisted by Nagorno-Karabakh authorities, which called it a strategy for Azerbaijan to gain control of the region.

In the 1990s, the Azerbaijani population was itself expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced within Azerbaijan. As part of its “Great Return” program, the government in Baku has already relocated Azerbaijanis to territories recaptured from Nagorno-Karabakh forces in a 2020 war.

Analysts believe Azerbaijan could expand the program and resettle Nagorno-Karabakh with Azerbaijanis, while stating that ethnic Armenians could stay or exercise a right to return in order to “refute accusations that Karabakh Armenians have been ethnically cleansed,” Broers said.

A decree signed by the region’s separatist president, Samvel Shakhramanyan, cited a Sept. 20 agreement to end the fighting under which Azerbaijan would allow the “free, voluntary and unhindered movement” of Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents to Armenia.

Some of those who fled the regional capital, Stepanakert, said they had no hope for the future.

“I left Stepanakert having a slight hope that maybe something will change and I will come back soon, and these hopes are ruined after reading about the dissolution of our government,” 21-year-old student Ani Abaghyan told The Associated Press.

“I don’t want to live with the Azerbaijanis," said Narine Karamyan, 50. “Maybe there are some people who will return to their homes. I don’t want that. I want to live as an Armenian.”

After six years of separatist fighting ended in 1994 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by Armenia. Then, during a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan took back parts of the region in the south Caucasus Mountains along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had claimed earlier. Nagorno-Karabakh was internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory.

Armine Ghazaryan, who crossed into Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh with her four young children, told the AP that it was the second time she had been displaced from her home, saying she had previously sheltered with her children in her neighbors' basement during the war in 2020.

“At least we live in peace here. At least we stay in Armenia," she said upon arriving in the Armenian town of Goris.

On Monday night, a fuel reservoir exploded at a gas station where people lined up for gas to fill up their vehicles to flee to Armenia. At least 68 people were killed and nearly 300 others were injured, with more than 100 others still considered missing after the blast, which exacerbated fuel shortages that were already dire after the blockade.

On Friday the State Emergency Service of Nagorno-Karabakh's interior ministry said 170 remains and body fragments had been collected and would be sent to Armenia for DNA identification.

Avanesyan, the Armenian health minister, said 142 people who were injured after the fuel tank exploded were taken to Armenia for treatment and that some of them were in very serious condition.

On Thursday, Azerbaijani authorities charged Ruben Vardanyan, the former head of Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist government, with financing terrorism, creating illegal armed formations and illegally crossing a state border. He was detained on Wednesday by Azerbaijani border guards as he was trying to leave Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia along with tens of thousands of others.

Vardanyan, a billionaire who made his fortune in Russia, was placed in pretrial detention for at least four months and faces up to 14 years in prison. His arrest appeared to indicate Azerbaijan’s intent to quickly enforce its grip on the region.

Another top separatist figure, Nagorno-Karabakh’s former foreign minister and now presidential adviser David Babayan, said Thursday that he would surrender to Azerbaijani authorities who ordered him to face an investigation in Baku.

Armenia: Cast Adrift in a Tough Neighborhood.
On the day Azerbaijan’s military sliced through the defenses of an ethnic Armenian redoubt last week, American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division had just finished a training mission in nearby Armenia, a longtime ally of Russia that has been trying to reduce its nearly total dependence on Moscow for its security.

The Americans unfurled a banner made up of the flags of the United States and Armenia, posed for photographs — and then left the country. At the same time, nearly 2,000 Russian “peacekeepers” were dealing with the mayhem unleashed by their earlier failure to keep the peace in the contested area, Nagorno-Karabakh, recognized internationally as being part of Azerbaijan.

The timing of the U.S. soldiers’ rapid exit at the end of their training work — carried out under the intimidating name Eagle Partner but involving only 85 soldiers — had been scheduled for months.

Yet, coinciding as it did with the host country’s greatest moment of need, it highlighted an inescapable reality for Armenia: While it might want to reduce its reliance on an untrustworthy Russian ally that, preoccupied by the war in Ukraine, did nothing to prevent last week’s debacle, the West offers no plausible alternative.

On Thursday, the defeated ethnic Armenian government of Nagorno-Karabakh formally dissolved itself and told residents they had no choice but to leave or to live under Azerbaijani rule, acknowledging a new reality enabled by Russian passivity and unhindered by Washington.

The Biden administration rushed out two senior officials over the weekend to the Armenian capital, Yerevan, to offer comfort to Armenia’s embattled prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan. But it has so far resisted placing sanctions on Azerbaijan for a military assault that the State Department previously said it would not countenance.

“We feel very alone and abandoned,” said Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, Pashinyan’s former foreign minister.

That is not a good position to be in for a country in the South Caucasus, a volatile region of the former Soviet Union where the destiny of small nations has for centuries been determined by the interests and ambitions of outside powers.

“Mentally, we live in Europe, but geographically, we live in a very different place,” said Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Caucasus Institute, a research group in Yerevan. “Our neighbors are not Switzerland and Luxembourg, but Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan.”

This tough and predominantly Muslim neighborhood has meant that Armenia, intensely proud of its history as one of the world’s oldest Christian civilizations, has traditionally looked to Russia for protection, particularly since the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire, a perennial enemy of the Russian Empire.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia in 1992 joined a Russian-led military alliance offering “collective security” and expanded close economic ties with Russia forged during the Soviet era. There are, by some estimates, more Armenians living in Russia than in their home country, which gets two-thirds of its energy from Russia.

These intimate bonds, however, have now frayed so badly that some supporters of Pashinyan fear that Russia wants to capitalize on public anger and daily protests in Yerevan over the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to try to topple the Armenian leader for having let U.S. troops in to help train his army.

The training mission was small and lasted just a few days, but that, along with other outreach to the West by Pashinyan — including a push to ratify a treaty that would make Russian President Vladimir Putin liable for arrest on suspicion of war crimes under a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court should he visit Armenia — infuriated Moscow.

“They blew it out of all proportion,” said Mnatsakanyan, because “in their view, you are either their stooge or an American stooge.” Armenia, he said, never had any intention of “jumping to America.”

“That is childish,” he added. “Playing simplistic geopolitical games, allowing ourselves to be the small change in global competition, is going to be at our cost.”

But the cost for Armenia, whatever its intentions, has already been high and could get much higher if, as many fear, Azerbaijan, with support from Turkey and a wink and a nod from a distracted Russia, expands its ambitions and tries to snatch a chunk of Armenian territory to open up a land corridor to Nakhchivan, a patch of Azerbaijani territory inside Armenia’s borders.

Benyamin Poghosyan, the former head of the Armenian Ministry of Defense’s research unit, said Azerbaijan’s conquest last week after more than three decades of on-off war in Nagorno-Karabakh “is not the end; it is just the start of another never-ending story.”

Pashinyan has so far weathered noisy, daily protests outside his office that show little sign of gaining momentum — to the frustration of pro-Russia activists like Mika Badalyan, a journalist and agitator, who warned Wednesday that “we have very little time.”

“All the talk about constitutional methods and impeachments,” he told his followers on the Telegram messaging app, “must be forgotten; Nikola will only be demolished by the street.”

Russian state media has frothed with bile against the prime minister, routinely described as a traitor to his people and to Russia, and against the United States for feasting, in Moscow’s view, on Russia’s travails in Ukraine to lure away its friends. “American jackals,” screamed Sergei Karnaukhov, a commentator on state television.

Tatul Hakobyan, an Armenian journalist who has known the prime minister for decades and meets with him regularly, said Russian state media and senior officials like former President Dmitry Medvedev were “openly supporting people in Armenia who want to topple Pashinyan.” But Putin, he added, has yet to show his hand.

Many Armenians blame Russian inaction for the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, accusing Moscow of abandoning its small ally in pursuit of bigger economic and diplomatic opportunities offered by Turkey and Azerbaijan.

That Russia would realign its priorities in favor of a former Soviet satrap like Azerbaijan or Turkey, which it has long viewed as an impertinent interloper into former Soviet lands, is a sign of how much the war in Ukraine has rearranged and shrunk Russia’s horizons.

“Azerbaijan and Turkey suddenly became a lot more important to Russia than we are because of the war in Ukraine,” Poghosyan said. “Russia is busy in Ukraine, and it doesn’t have a lot of interest in us.”

In a bitter speech last weekend to mark Armenia’s independence day, Pashinyan said responsibility for the suffering of tens of thousands of terrified ethnic Armenians fleeing their conquered enclave lies “entirely” with Azerbaijan and “on the peacekeeping troops of the Russian Federation in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Armenia, he added, “has never betrayed its allies,” but “the security systems and allies we have relied on for many years have set a task to demonstrate our vulnerabilities and justify the impossibility of the Armenian people to have an independent state.”

For some of the more than 75,000 ethnic Armenians who had fled Nagorno-Karabakh by Thursday, the explanation for their plight is simple: Unlike Azerbaijan, Armenia has neither large reserves of oil and gas nor control of vital transport routes to Iran, an important source of weapons and other support for Russia in Ukraine.

“They succeed because they have oil and they buy everyone,” said Naver Grigoryan, a Nagorno-Karabakh musician who joined a cavalcade of cars and trucks carrying refugees into Armenia. “We have nothing. We can only talk.”

Azerbaijan’s energy resources have also made it a vital partner for the European Union, whose hunger for energy as it tries to wean itself off deliveries from Russia make autocratic Azerbaijan a “reliable, trustworthy partner,” as a high-ranking EU official said last year.

The EU has condemned Azerbaijan’s attack on Nagorno-Karabakh but has taken no concrete action.

The Biden administration has stressed in the past that the use of force in Nagorno-Karabakh was “unacceptable.” Nevertheless, in a meeting with Pashinyan in Armenia this week, Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said only that the United States expressed support for his leadership and “reformist government.”

Ashot Manutiyan, a retired mining engineer taking part in the protests against Pashinyan, said he was encouraged by the U.S.’ statements of support for Armenia’s government because they might suggest it was doomed.

“Look what happened to Saakashvili,” he said, referring to the zealously pro-Western former president of neighboring Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. “Where is he now? He is sick and in jail.”

He cursed Russia for not intervening to stop Azerbaijan’s attack on Nagorno-Karabakh but said “small countries like Armenia” in Russia’s backyard can’t afford to “poke the bear, especially when it is sick” because of its war in Ukraine.