Nikol Pashinyan

Nikol Pashinyan walked from Gyumri to Yerevan in 2018 and became prime minister of Armenia two weeks later without a shot being fired. He was a newspaper editor who had been imprisoned after the disputed 2008 election and elected to parliament from a prison cell. The Velvet Revolution began as a protest against Serzh Sargsyan moving from the presidency to the premiership after a constitutional change that shifted power to that office; the marches grew to hundreds of thousands, the ruling party lost its nerve, and Sargsyan resigned saying he had been wrong. Pashinyan's government prosecuted former officials for corruption and won a large majority. Then came the war. In autumn 2020 Azerbaijan, with Turkish drones and Israeli loitering munitions, retook most of the territory around Nagorno-Karabakh in forty-four days, and Pashinyan signed a ceasefire that ceded it; crowds ransacked the parliament building. Azerbaijan took the remainder in September 2023 and essentially the whole Armenian population of some hundred thousand left within a week. He has survived politically by arguing that Armenia must accept the borders it has and reorient away from Russia, which is the most contested proposition in Armenian politics. Armenia froze its participation in the Russian-led security treaty in 2024 and began talks with the European Union, which is a reversal of a century of alignment. The border with Turkey has been closed since 1993. He has faced repeated calls for his resignation from the church and the opposition, and has won the elections held since, most recently in 2021.

• Lived: 1975 CE – ?
• Nationality: Armenian
• Roles: head_of_government