Armenia's Velvet Revolution
Serzh Sargsyan had served two terms as president and had overseen a constitutional change moving power to the prime minister. When he took that office in April 2018, having said he would not, Nikol Pashinyan — an opposition member of parliament and former journalist — began a march from Gyumri to Yerevan under the slogan 'Take a step, reject Serzh'. The protests grew into a general blockade of the capital. The army declined to intervene, and Sargsyan resigned within eleven days. Parliament elected Pashinyan prime minister in May, and his bloc won a landslide in December. No one was killed. Unusually for the post-Soviet space, the change was not framed as a geopolitical reorientation: Pashinyan explicitly maintained Armenia's membership of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, understanding that Armenia's security position depended on Moscow. That calculation did not hold. In the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war Azerbaijan, equipped with Turkish and Israeli drones, retook most of the territory in six weeks while Russian support did not materialise in the form Yerevan expected; in 2023 Azerbaijan took the remainder and the region's Armenian population left almost entirely. Armenia has since moved to distance itself from the CSTO.
- Year: 2018 CE
- Category: Political
