“Even if [military power] is sixth at the bottom [of a list of security tools] that’s still bad because it means you have only five other security tools above the army,” Pashinian told a security forum in Yerevan. “You have to make sure the army is 15th, 20th, 50th, 100th.”
“If our strategy is that we need to have a strong army vis-à-vis a presumptive adversary, what will be our reaction if it turns out that the presumptive adversary has three or four other super-strong parties involved with it? Will it mean that our strategy is worthless?” he said, seemingly alluding to Azerbaijan’s military alliance with Turkey.
Pashinian put international “legitimacy” on the top of his list of security factors and said agreements reached in Washington last month put an end to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
His political opponents maintain that those agreements are based on unilateral Armenian concessions, will not bring real peace and will on the contrary encourage Baku to demand even more from Yerevan. They say that Pashinian is putting Armenia’s very survival at the mercy of Azerbaijan as well as Turkey, instead of rebuilding the Armenian army, repairing relations with Russia, the country’s traditional ally, and forging military ties with Iran.
U.S. - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian holds a signed trilateral declaration during a ceremony with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and President Donald Trump at the White House, August 8, 2025.
“It is only with combat-ready armed forces that you can act from a much stronger position in international relations, in negotiations with any subject of international law,” Tigran Abrahamian, an opposition parliamentarian, said, commenting on Pashinian’s statement.
“Why has Azerbaijan resorted to more blackmail in the post-war situation?” Abrahamian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Why has Azerbaijan constantly extorted concessions from the Armenian authorities? Because it acts from a position of strength, because even during these five years [since the war in Nagorno-Karabakh,] Azerbaijan has greatly increased its military potential, while the Armenian authorities are taking the exact opposite path.”
“Now, in order to justify its defeatism, the government is constantly trying to reduce the role of the army, to show that the army is not fulfilling its mission at all. The next step will be to reduce the military budget and reduce personnel,” he said.
Armenia - Opposition lawmaker Tigran Abrahamian speaks at a news briefing in Yerevan, March 28, 2025.
Pashinian’s administration has already signaled such steps. A bill drafted by the Armenian Defense Ministry and posted on a government website last week would shorten compulsory military service in the country from two years to 18 months. Critics believe that this would inevitably downsize Armenia’s conscription-based army which is already grappling with recruitment problems.
Also, Pashinian indicated last month that he is planning to end significant annual increases in Armenian defense spending that followed the 2020 war.
Senior Azerbaijani officials have repeatedly stated that Armenia’s “militarization” is one of the obstacles to peace between the two countries. One of them called last year for “restrictions” to be placed on the Armenian armed forces.
Baku makes the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty, initialed in Washington on August 8, conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution. Armenian opposition figures say that even if the treaty is signed it will not preclude further Azerbaijani military attacks on Armenia. Later in August, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev implicitly warned of the possibility of such military action and vowed to continue to reinforce Azerbaijan’s armed forces.
Aliyev made a point of receiving Turkey’s top military general, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu, in Karabakh on Monday. They were reported to praise an ongoing further deepening of Turkish-Azerbaijani military ties.