Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have suffered significant losses from the resumption of local hostilities. However, the greatest political losses have been and may continue to be suffered by Nikol Pashinyan.
The problem with the current Armenian prime minister is that he can give his country neither peace nor war. That is, he can give war, as he has already done once, but he cannot give victory in it. After all, each new major war will bring Armenia new defeats and territorial losses, which may lead to the loss of statehood at the end of this path.
In general, there were impressions and hopes that it is precisely Pashinyan and many of his supporters who understand and use Armenia’s defeat in the last war, for which they blame the Karabakh clan, to bring peace to their country. Hence the statements that Armenia cannot recognize the independence of the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and the negotiations with Azerbaijan to conclude a peace treaty.
All this has long made Pashinyan a «traitor of the nation» and a «Turkish Nikola» in the eyes of Armenian ultranationalists and militarists. And now they are holding rallies demanding his removal from power and calling for a general mobilization (just like the Russian «Vatniks») in order to «crush Azerbaijan» in a new war. The idiocy of these calls is obvious, first of all for Armenia itself.
But the problem is that Pashinyan has not been able to become an alternative to these sentiments in action, not just in words. Having been in power for several years and having received a mandate from the majority of Armenian voters in several elections, he has not been able to free Armenia from the burden of the Karabakh problem, the unresolved nature of which (through the return of Karabakh to its rightful owner) exposes it to the consequences of a new war.
Moreover, while he could still explain the previous war as a result of the inertia of the Karabakh clan’s policy and the problems it left him, he will now bear the responsibility for the new one. He had enough time to prevent it, but it is fast running out. Tik-tok, Pashinyan.