Government's performance

Robert Kocharyan, a former Armenian president, and the incumbent leader of an opposition Armenia bloc, has criticised the performance of the government led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at a news conference on 27 December.

Kocharyan said that the government had failed to improve living standards even if it had tried to.

He said the poverty level was 27-30%. "Polarisation between the poor and the rich only deepened during this year," he said.

He also said that the government's fight against Covid-19 had failed, 103,000 Armenians had left the country in January-September, and 34,000 had adopted Russian citizenship. He said that not only opposition-minded people had left Armenia and that their number may have been smaller than the number of those who had voted for the Pashinyan government and left the country.

Kocharyan said that three defence ministries had been appointed, with none of them fit for the position, and two chiefs of the army's General Staff had been appointed in Armenia during the year.

"There is the persistent rumour that the incumbent chief of the General Staff will be replaced as well. They are waiting for a report in the newspaper Haykakan Zhamanak for that to happen," he said.

The newspaper is run by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's wife Anna Hakobyan.

Kocharyan also said that defence ministry leadership could not be changed "like socks." "This government is not interested in a battleworthy army because if there was a battle-worthy army, our people would be demanding something different from the government. They would have demanded that the road should not have been surrendered," he said, presumably referring to a road which partly runs through Azerbaijan.

Kocharyan said that people's current fear of a possible war with Azerbaijan was letting the government do things that Armenians would otherwise not allow it to do. He also suggested that "this situation is to some extent artificially created."

Kocharyan also said that there was a "complete failure" regarding Armenia's security because there was no improvement made regarding anything in 2021.

He said opinion polls showed that up to 80% of the population was concerned about security. "The country is not able to develop in these conditions," he said.

Kocharyan recalled that the government had acknowledged that more than 40 square kilometres of Armenian territory had come under Azerbaijan's control earlier in the year. However, he said, Armenia has lost control not over those 40-50 square kilometres but over areas a dozen times larger.

He said the use of GPS to determine the border with Azerbaijan had led to the deployment of Azerbaijani troops along the supposed border and Armenia had had to retreat 500 metres to 1-1.5 kilometres and a bit more in some places. He said it had happened not only in the Vardenis-Araxes area but also near Azerbaijan's exclave Nakhchivan even before the 2020 war with Baku.

Kocharyan also said that 36 Armenians had been killed, 30 wounded and more than 30 soldiers taken captive by Azerbaijan during the year, and nothing had been done to improve the army's combat capability.

He said more than 30 soldiers being taken captive in combat for two or three positions spoke of serious problems in the army and said that the psychological impact that Pashinyan's statements had on soldiers was to blame.

He said that nothing had been done over the year to restore the army's weaponry, and the army's budget did not give hope that these issues would be solved in 2022.

He also said that it was "a disgrace" that the government had not publicised the number of deaths in the 2020 Karabakh war.

Preparations for mass protests

Furthermore, Robert Kocharyan said that preparations for mass protests are underway amid a dramatic decrease in the approval ratings of the incumbent government in Yerevan.

"The current situation disappoints some of our supporters who are ready to fight... We must prepare and we are already preparing for a mass uprising," Kocharyan was quoted as saying. He said proper preparations needed to be made to be sure that their actions led to "success."

He explained said that he realised that people expected "more radical actions" from the opposition following the June 2020 election in Armenia after which, he said, there was "a radical decrease in the ratings of the incumbent government." He added, however, that "the decline in the government's approval ratings has not transformed into the masses' readiness to fight hard."

Kocharyan also said that Armenia stopped being a democracy because it had stopped being a law-government state, News.am reported.

"Late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il would have died of envy. There has never been something like this in Armenia," he said while commenting on the recent local elections in Armenia. He said the prosecutor's office had stopped being "the guard of legislation and the constitution" but had become a guard of "a coloured change of government."