The prime minister versus the church Why Armenian leader Nikol Pashinyan is arresting priests over an alleged coup plot
On June 27, officers from Armenia’s National Security Service attempted to storm the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, a monastic complex near Yerevan that serves as the residence of Catholicos Karekin II, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church (AAC). They were searching for Mikael Adjapakhyan, head of the Church’s Shirak Diocese, whom state investigators had accused of calling to overthrow the government, and they soon found and detained him. Two days earlier, another archbishop, Bagrat Galstanyan — who had led protests in the spring and summer of 2024 — was arrested on similar charges. Billionaire Samvel Karapetyan was also detained for publicly supporting the AAC.
For Meduza, Caucasus expert Roman Chernikov explains why Nikol Pashinyan has launched this unprecedented confrontation with Armenia’s clergy — and where it could lead.
How the church became Armenia’s main opposition force
If you look back at Armenian media coverage of the Armenian Apostolic Church (AAC) in 2018–2019, it’s striking that open conflict between the church and Nikol Pashinyan’s government didn’t break out sooner.
As early as fall 2018, just months after Pashinyan took office, he told supporters at a campaign event:
The church has never been as discredited as it was during the Republican Party’s rule. [Previous Armenian Prime Minister] Serzh Sargsyan and his team tried to turn the church into an arm of the government — and in some cases, they succeeded. They even involved members of the clergy in corruption.
For its part, the Republican Party was already describing the AAC as “an inseparable part of Armenian identity” that was now under threat from the new authorities. Meanwhile, media outlets linked to the old elites were spreading rumors that Pashinyan and his wife were members of one of the Protestant churches that are often labeled “sects” in the post-Soviet space.
Even International Affairs, a magazine directly affiliated with Russia’s Foreign Ministry, sounded the alarm:
Nikol Pashinyan’s party is actively supported by members of numerous sects (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Word of Life, Pentecostals, Horan, Mormons, the Evangelical Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and others) who work closely with the U.S. Embassy, as well as with LGBT activists and other easily manipulated groups.
Pashinyan, however, insisted that he belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church and was ready to fight against these “sects.”
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BBC reported in detail on a telling episode that occurred during this period. In May 2018, a priest named Koryun Arakelyan spoke out against Catholicos Karekin II and launched a movement called “New Armenia — New Patriarch.” He publicly accused the Catholicos of breaking his vow of celibacy, but his main charges concerned Karekin’s alleged wealth and authoritarian leadership.
According to Arakelyan, he expected support from Pashinyan, but it never came. On the contrary, BBC sources said the newly appointed officials were instructed not to publicly criticize the clergy.
This was no surprise: having already taken on the old elites and launched an anti-corruption campaign, Pashinyan didn’t want to make things even harder for himself. His top priorities in 2018 were holding snap elections; in 2019, prosecuting former president Robert Kocharyan; and in 2020, confronting the Constitutional Court — and then came the war in Karabakh.
After Armenia’s defeat in that conflict, the government’s problems only deepened. In December 2020, Catholicos Karekin II, for the first time, publicly called on Pashinyan to resign.
He would repeat that demand over and over, but to no avail. Despite Pashinyan’s low approval ratings, his potential rivals — including figures close to former presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan — were even less popular.
And so, strange as it may seem, the main opposition to Armenia’s government wasn’t a political party at all — it was the Church.
Who is Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan?
Since Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war, there have been many attempts to deal a decisive blow to Pashinyan’s rule — but all of them have faltered for lack of a charismatic leader. Former presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan tended to alienate protesters rather than unite them, while other figures lacked both public recognition and personal appeal.
At one point in early 2021, the opposition’s expected candidate for prime minister was Vazgen Manukyan, a former defense minister. Then, however, he was charged with calling for the violent overthrow of the government. He ultimately received a relatively lenient sentence about three years later: a fine of 400,000 drams (about $1,040).
After Pashinyan won re-election in June 2021, opposition lawmaker Ishkhan Saghatelyan tried to keep the protest movement alive, regularly rallying supporters in the streets. But even when the last Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh — an event that could have fueled massive outrage — his efforts failed to gain serious momentum. There were dozens of rallies and marches, but none posed a real threat to the government.
The protest movement of 2024, however, gained far more support. It erupted during the border delimitation process between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Tavush region. This time, the leader of the protests wasn’t a politician but a priest: Bishop Bagrat Galstanyan of the Tavush Diocese.
However, Galstanyan quickly faded from the spotlight. On June 12, 2024, his supporters tried to blockade Armenia’s parliament building and clashed violently with police. Instead of fueling the protests, the bloodshed seemed to extinguish them.
Galstanyan’s actions — including blocking major highways for several days with his followers and calling for acts of civil disobedience in Yerevan — could have been grounds for opening a criminal case against him even then. But no case was opened.
Today, many of Pashinyan’s critics point to this as evidence that the charges now being brought against Galstanyan are politically motivated. They argue that if there was no legal basis to prosecute him last year, nothing has changed since then — and that the government is fabricating evidence of an alleged coup attempt. According to investigators, the planned coup was originally supposed to take place not in 2025, but in 2024.
Even Catholicos Karekin II, who Galstanyan openly said had blessed his actions, was left untouched last year.
Still, as far back as May 2024, Pashinyan had already promised to “deal with” the church within two to three months, calling it “an agent of foreign influence.” He drew a historical comparison to the Middle Ages, when Armenian church leaders received their anointment in Byzantium and, upon returning, promoted that empire’s interests in Armenia. The subtext seemed to point to Russia: although Moscow had no direct role in Karekin II’s appointment, his brother Ezras heads the AAC’s Russian and Novo-Nakhichevan Diocese.
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The Armenian Telegram channel Parallel Z accurately predicted as early as 2024 that both Bagrat Galstanyan and Mikael Adjapakhyan from the Shirak Diocese would eventually be arrested. “We all know the Pashinyan regime opens criminal cases over a single word if it wants to. They’ve been looking for a pretext for a while now. Give them some time, they’ll gather concoct some kind of materials, and off they’ll go,” read a post from a year ago.
What’s real and what’s fabricated in the coup plot remains unclear. So far, investigators are trying to build their case on a few low-quality audio recordings and some PDF files, claiming that Galstanyan urged his supporters to torch cars in Yerevan, block roads, and seize power by force.
What are the odds of a truce?
The latest stage of the standoff began with an ill-conceived comment from Nikol Pashinyan about churches. On May 28, 2025, he compared them to storage closets where people dump things they no longer need.
Archbishop Arshak Khachatryan, chief of staff of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, fired back, saying Pashinyan was displaying “a lack of the so-called ‘cool’ education he claims to have, as well as a serious failure of public communication and deep understanding of the issues at hand.”
The conflict escalated the next day, May 30, when Pashinyan published a series of Facebook posts attacking the church. In the most provocative one, he wrote: “Your Holiness, why don’t you go back to screwing your uncle’s wife instead of meddling in my life?”
He went on to allege that Karekin II had a daughter, suggesting he had broken his vow of celibacy, and called for him to be removed as head of the AAC.
Pashinyan’s wife, Anna Hakobyan, also joined the fray, calling Karekin II a “mafia boss” and labeling the clergy “the country’s top pedophiles.”
On June 10, Pashinyan announced the creation of a new working group tasked with “cleansing the patriarchate, so that with Christian love a true servant of God can be elected Catholicos of All Armenians.” But since then, no updates have emerged about the group’s work.
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Complicating matters further is the figure of Argishti Kyaramyan, one of Pashinyan’s top security officials and the former head of Armenia’s Investigative Committee. He is widely believed to be the illegitimate son of Bishop Arakel Kyaramyan, head of the Church’s Kotayk Diocese.
Argishti Kyaramyan has repeatedly dodged questions about his father, admitting only that Bishop Arakel is a distant relative. But few have found this explanation convincing: it was clear that the young Argishti Kyaramyan (now 34) was being artificially fast-tracked through the ranks. For example, to formally meet the requirements for his appointment to the National Security Service in 2020, he was made deputy head of the Investigative Committee for a single day.
This has fueled speculation that “father and son are Pashinyan’s main informants on the inner workings of the AAC” and that Bishop Arakel is the most likely candidate to replace Karekin II as a Pashinyan-loyal Catholicos. For now, though, the Kotayk Diocese — like the rest of the church — has publicly backed Karekin II.
Billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian passport holder, also publicly supported the Catholicos. He was the first person to be detained in this wave of arrests (and the only non-clergy member), charged with inciting the overthrow of the government. The charges against him leave room for either a fine or up to five years in prison. Karapetyan is also rumored to be a potential financial backer of the protests and the opposition’s election campaign next year. The vote is scheduled for June 7, 2026.
Armenian opposition figures claim the crackdown on clergy is a smokescreen, meant to distract attention from Karapetyan’s arrest and deflect anger from Moscow. But so far, the evidence points to the opposite: Karapetyan seems to have been caught in the crossfire of the government’s battle with the church.
It’s hard to imagine the conflict cooling down anytime soon. With parliamentary elections looming that could decide Pashinyan’s political future, the AAC leadership, deeply offended by his remarks, will likely do everything in its power to bring down his government. The masks are off; no one is pretending anymore that the church is staying out of politics.
On the other hand, it’s unclear how Pashinyan expects to win this fight. Forcing out the Catholicos will be extremely difficult, especially if the church remains united.
Of course, Karekin II has his critics within the clergy. But after Pashinyan’s inflammatory attacks on the church as a whole, those critics may think twice about risking everything to support him.
Analysis by Roman Chernikov