When former Armenian president Robert Kocharyan stood before supporters on 6 December to declare that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan might be an “agent”, “ignorant”, or “acting deliberately” against the state, it was not simply another political outburst. It was the latest chapter in a long and damaging campaign by Armenia’s old guard to sabotage the fragile foundations of peace in the South Caucasus. And more significantly, it revealed the core truth of Armenian politics today: the real force undermining national stability is not the Armenian Church, as some insist, but the remnants of the so-called Karabakh Clan, the very political group to which Kocharyan belongs.

For years, Kocharyan has cultivated an atmosphere of suspicion, revanchism, and historical denialism. His statements now follow the same familiar script, portray the sitting government as traitorous, declare external enemies omnipresent, and insist that peace is somehow an existential threat to the Armenian state. Yet this narrative collapses the moment one examines the record. If anyone has been destroying the possibility of normalisation and regional stability, it is Kocharyan himself and the political formation he represents.

To understand Kocharyan’s rhetoric, one must recall the decades in which he and his allies controlled Armenia’s political system. During those years, instead of acknowledging reality, they built an entire national ideology around falsehoods regarding the occupation of Azerbaijani territories. Rather than encouraging compromise, they entrenched a maximalist position that left Armenia diplomatically isolated and strategically cornered. This was no accident; it was policy...

The myth of an “independent Artsakh” or the illusion that Armenia could indefinitely control territories recognised internationally as Azerbaijani became the cornerstone of Kocharyan-era politics. Armenian society was fed the story that the occupation was somehow sustainable and that time was on Armenia’s side. But as the saying goes, lies have short legs. They can run only so far before the truth catches up.

Garabagh was never recognised as Armenian, and it was under Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan that........

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