When a nation asks “why are we here,” it rarely gets a single answer. Armenia has three — one for each former president. None of them is comfortable.
Levon Ter-Petrosyan said out loud what many whispered in the late 1990s: without a painful compromise on Karabakh, the country would be trapped between war and illusions. He was ready for a phased deal — land for security guarantees now, status later. That stance cost him the presidency: Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan opposed it, and Levon stepped down. Armenia chose postponement over settlement — and delay made the eventual bill heavier.
Robert Kocharyan offered strength and growth, but at the price of an entrenched oligarchic order. Critics called it a system of captured institutions and monopolized markets; March 1–2, 2008 etched a bloody warning into public memory. The legal case later collapsed on constitutional grounds, but the lesson remained: a state can be strong against its citizens and weak for them.
Serzh Sargsyan perfected “balanced stability” — until he tried to stay in power after constitutional changes. A tired country pushed back; the streets lifted Nikol Pashinyan. In plain terms: without Sargsyan’s decision to preserve the old architecture, there would have been no Velvet Revolution and no Pashinyan as prime minister.
As for corruption, call it a culture, not an episode. Reports over years described state–business fusion and informal rule-making. That habit took root under Kocharyan and Sargsyan and then haunted their successors.
Who enabled Pashinyan’s rise? Directly — Serzh Sargsyan’s attempt to hold on to power. Indirectly — two decades of postponed solutions and institutional fatigue. Pashinyan was a symptom of accumulated mistrust, not its cause.
Who bears the heaviest responsibility for the loss of Artsakh? Defeats are rarely born in a year; they mature over decades. Armenia rejected a compromise in 1998, entrenched a clan economy through the 2000s, and froze reforms in the 2010s. When reality struck in 2020, the façade collapsed. In that chain, Kocharyan’s and Sargsyan’s choices weigh more — they reversed the compromise track and consolidated a system unable to learn.
“Who robbed Armenia?” “Who abetted corruption?” Courts name culprits; writers trace patterns. The pattern — state capture, monopolies, informal deals — is well documented by domestic and international observers, even when verdicts are scarce.
Bottom line:
Levon tried to turn the ship toward peace and lost the helm.
Kocharyan gave the sense of strength while hollowing out the institutions that make strength real.
Sargsyan clung to the past — and that detonated the past.
Then came Pashinyan — as consequence, not cause — to face a debt accumulated long before him.
By Lida Nalbandyan, Founder and CEO of Octopus Media Group