The Armenian Velvet Revolution is over: Pashinian voted in as prime minister

Monica Ellena

 

The honking started early. Around Grigor Lusavorich (“The Illuminator”) Church, vehicles of all shapes and ages set out hours before Armenia’s National Assembly was due to convene to appoint the country’s new prime minister. Ancient Soviet Ladas and shiny SUVs alike were driven down the central Tigran Mets, all flapping the Armenian orange-blue-red flag, and all beeping, hard. It was the summons to the square.

Not that people needed it. After weeks of protests that have transformed Armenia’s politics from a sluggish Soviet Lada to a speedy Lamborghini in a matter of three weeks, Republic Square has become the pulsing heart of a whole country called to wake up from its lethargic post-Soviet stillness.

Nagorno-Karabakh’s a Happy Breakaway Republic, But Its War Goes On

Anna Nemtsova

At sunset flocks of swallows race through the pink sky over the central square of Stepanakert, a city once bombed and largely destroyed in a the post-Soviet war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the 21 years since the heavy fighting ended, there is still occasional shooting around the frontier with Azerbaijan, but this capital of the self-proclaimed state — this early “breakaway republic” — of Nagorno-Karabakh is peaceful.

Superficially, it resembles other quasi-nations dotting the map of the former Soviet Union: Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Transnistria and more recently the embattled self-proclaimed states of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine. But where those have depended mainly on Russian backing, and critics would argue they are Russian creations, Nagorno-Karabakh has found other sponsors.