Armenians throng center of the capital to demand the prime minister’s resignation

YEREVAN, Armenia — Tens of thousands of demonstrators staged a protest in the center of Armenia’s capital on Sunday, calling for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to resign after Armenia agreed to hand over control of several border villages to Azerbaijan.

The rally was the latest in a week-long series of meetings led by a senior cleric of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Bagrat Galstanyan, archbishop of the Tavush diocese in northeastern Armenia.

He spearheaded the formation of a movement called Tavush for the Fatherland after Armenia agreed in April to cede control of four villages in the region to Azerbaijan. Although the villages were the central focus of the movement, it has expanded to express a wide range of grievances about Pashinyan and his government.

Leaders of the movement said at Sunday’s rally that they support Galstanyan becoming the next prime minister.

The decision to hand over the Tavush villages followed the lightning military campaign in September in which the Azerbaijani army forced ethnic Armenian separatist authorities in the Karabakh region to capitulate.

After Azerbaijan took full control of Karabakh, some 120,000 people fled the region, almost all of its ethnic Armenian population.

Ethnic Armenian fighters backed by Armenian forces had taken control of Karabakh in 1994, at the end of a six-year war. Azerbaijan regained some territory in fighting in 2020 that ended in an armistice that brought in a Russian peacekeeping force, which began withdrawing this year.

Pashinyan has said Armenia needs to quickly define the border with Azerbaijan to avoid a new round of hostilities.