Armenia’s army turns on its prime minister

FOR A MAN in his own army’s cross-hairs, Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister, seems unfazed. As long as the Armenian people have the final say, “there will be no coup,” he told The Economist this week. The only way out of the crisis consuming his country, he says, leads through the ballot box and early elections.

There are no tanks on the street in Yerevan. But Mr Pashinyan is fighting for his political life. On February 25th dozens of officers, including the country’s top soldier, Onik Gasparyan, demanded the prime minister’s resignation, accusing him of incompetence. Mr Pashinyan called this an attempted coup, refused to step down and ordered Mr Gasparyan to do so instead. (So far, he has not.)

Tensions in Armenia have been brewing since November, when Mr Pashinyan signed an armistice with Azerbaijan, ending a war over Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist ethnic-Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. More than 6,000 people died in the fighting. Armenian defences were pummelled by Turkish drones and overrun by Azerbaijani ground forces. Under the ceasefire agreement, Armenia gave up control of swathes of land which it had captured around Karabakh three decades earlier. The enclave’s status remains unresolved. Some 2,000 Russian troops have been deployed there to keep the peace.

To many...