The leadership of Armenia’s armed forces has called for the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his government, and Pashinyan responded by calling his supporters to Yerevan’s central square. It is the biggest challenge yet to the prime minister, who has been barely hanging on to power following the country’s catastrophic loss in a war with Azerbaijan last year.

The spokesperson of the ministry of defense, Samvel Asatryan, wrote the appeal on his Facebook page the morning of February 25. The extraordinary statement, signed by dozens of senior officers, criticized the firing of the deputy chief of staff of the armed forces the day before. The official had mocked Pashinyan in an interview.

“Due to the current situation, the armed forces of the Republic of Armenia demand the resignation of the prime minister and government of the Republic of Armenia, at the same time warning against the use of force against the people who died defending the homeland and Artsakh,” the officers said, referring to the Armenian word for Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory at the heart of the conflict with Azerbaijan. “The army has always been with the people and the people with the army.”

Pashinyan responded in his own Facebook message calling the statement a “coup attempt” and calling his supporters to a 4 pm demonstration at Yerevan’s central Republic Square. That square was the center of the massive demonstrations of the “Velvet Revolution” that Pashinyan rode to power three years ago. By early afternoon he had already appeared at the square, preparing to lead a march around the city before addressing the crowd at 4.

Pashinyan also announced that he had fired the chief of staff of the armed forces, Onnik Gasparyan, but added that Defense Minister Vagharshak Harutyunyan remains loyal.

“If we want to find out the truth about the war we can’t not ask questions to our senior army officers, but some of our beloved and respected generals do not like that we and the public could have some questions,” Pashinyan said.

The “military’s open challenge to the democratically elected government” was “unprecedented,” said Richard Giragosian, the head of the think tank Regional Studies Center, in an interview with ANews TV. Still, Pashinyan was “perhaps making a mistake by going to the street, where the conflict could spiral out of control," Giragosian said.

The military officials’ statement came amid renewed protests against Pashinyan and his government, led by a coalition of opposition political parties who also have been calling on the leadership to step down. “We have to give Pashinyan’s members of parliament a way out,” said Vazgen Manukyan, the alliance’s candidate for prime minister, in one such protest on February 20. That was the opposition’s “Plan A,” he said, and “Plan B” was: “You have to be ready to take power at any moment by rebellion with a lightning speed.” That alliance was gathering its supporters about a kilometer away Yerevan's Liberty Square.

Pashinyan himself may have accelerated the rebellion by some intemperate remarks about Russian weaponry.

In a February 23 interview with local television, Pashinyan said that the Iskander missiles in Armenia’s armory – the most sophisticated weapons it possesses – were effectively duds. The Iskanders launched during the war, he said, “didn’t explode, or maybe ten percent of them exploded.” The interviewer pressed him, asking if that was really true, and Pashinyan cryptically responded “I don’t know. … maybe they were weapons from the 80s.”

All of that was in response to an interview the week before of Pashinyan’s predecessor, Serzh Sargsyan, whom he ousted in the Velvet Revolution. The ex-president criticized Pashinyan for not using the Iskander missiles until the waning days of the war; the interviewer was asking Pashinyan to respond to that statement. Also, as it happens, Sargsyan was notorious for arguing following the last big conflict with Azerbaijan, 2016’s April War, that the Armenian armed forces were fighting with “weapons from the ‘80s.” Sargsyan was heavily criticized for the statement and Pashinyan, in January 2020, pointed to several new Russian weapons acquisitions and bragged that “the shameful chapter of weapons from the ‘80s is over.”

In Russia – where arms exports are a serious business, and Russian weaponry a matter of state prestige – the comment was a bigger misfire than even the Armenian Iskanders. Armenia is the only state other than Russia to own the advanced system.

The deputy head of the state Duma defense committee, Viktor Zavarzin, said that Pashinyan’s statement was an “absolute lie” and said that he was only trying to deflect blame from his own failures. The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, in a story headlined “Don’t mock our Iskanders, Mr. Pashinyan,” interviewed a senior Russian missile engineer.

“If he claims that the Russian Iskanders were ineffective, Pashinyan needs to watch his mouth,” the engineer, Vladimir Kovalev, told the newspaper. “To make such serious claims against the rocket complex and then publicly admit that he ‘doesn’t know’ the issue – it’s unworthy and even dishonorable for the prime minister of Armenia. And his claim about ‘weapons from the 80s’ is a sign of the ignorance of a dilettante. What kind of ‘weapons from the 80s’ can we be talking about if the Russian army only finished equipping itself with Iskanders only at the end of 2019? And Armenia even got some of these complexes even before we did, as allies.”

The Russian news agency TASS even gathered some Russian military experts to claim that the Iskanders weren’t even used at all during the war, though there is plenty of evidence that they were.

American military analyst Rob Lee, who has closely followed the conflict, said there was some merit to the criticism of Armenia’s use of the Iskanders. “The big question is why they didn’t use it earlier in the conflict,” he told Eurasianet. One obvious potential target: the bases of the Turkish Bayraktar drones which the Azerbaijani forces used to such success. “Waiting to use it on Shusha was a last-ditch effort, but it was a waste to use such a long-range system on a close target. So I think that’s why Pashinyan tried to deflect by saying they weren’t effective, to deflect blame for why he didn’t use them properly.”

In any case, it was an extraordinary own goal, given the deep dependence on Russia in which Armenia now finds itself. “Such a public stab in the back of Russia, when Armenia’s security completely depends on Russia, is baffling,” wrote analyst Hrant Mikaelian.

The reaction from Armenia’s own armed forces also was swift. The deputy chief of staff, Tiran Khachatryan, was asked in a February 24 interview about Pashinyan’s comments, and began his response by laughing. They were “a superficial assessment” and “not serious,” he said. He was fired later the same day, setting in motion his fellow officers’ opposition.

"Serious mistakes in foreign policy have brought the country to the brink of collapse,” the officers said in their statement. The military had “patiently tolerated the incumbent authorities for a long time when they were attacking armed forces, attempting to discredit them” but that “everything has its limits.”