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Akbar Novruz

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In the Ararat region of Armenia, there exists a small village that occupies a land area of around eight square kilometres and lies next to the M2 Highway, which connects the northern and southern parts of the country and even stretches into Iran. This place is called Tigranashen. However, since the Soviet era, the village's official name has been changed from its earlier Azerbaijani name, Kyarki, to its current name, Tigranashen. At the public meeting on Wednesday, Nikol Pashinyan referred to this place as Kyarki. The opposition in Armenia took it as a sign of surrender of the country by Pashinyan. Pashinyan reacted as though he had stated an administrative fact. Both reactions tell you something real about the state of Armenia in August 2026.

Speaking at the briefing on August 20, Pashinyan said:

"On the maps existing at the time of the adoption of the Alma-Ata declaration, Artsvashen is a territory of Armenia, while Kyarki, Baghanis-Ayrum, Barkhudarlu, Yukhari Askipara are not the territory of Armenia. This is a fact that we are dealing with."

Armenia's territory is 29,743 sq km according to the 1991 Alma-Ata declaration, which was adopted as the basis of the delimitation process and which was the main principle of a commission agreement signed in August 2024 and approved in October. That calculation includes Artsvashen, the Armenian village under Azerbaijani control since the First Karabakh War. However, it does not include Kyarki and the other Azerbaijani enclaves surrounded by Armenian territory. Pashinyan was not making a concession. He was reading the map that both governments agreed to use.

Opposition excessive analysis

The substitution of "Kyarki" for "Tigranashen" is, in the technical context of border delimitation, a statement of legal reference rather than a claim of cultural ownership. When a prime minister uses the administrative toponym that appears on the 1991 Soviet maps that form the legal basis of the delimitation process, he is using the language of the document. That is what Pashinyan was doing. Armenia's opposition, including ARF lawmaker Kristine Vardanyan, argued that cartographic changes to the village's name, including Google Maps relabelling it, could occur only based on information from official or institutional channels, and linked the issue to broader concerns about what the government may have privately agreed with Azerbaijan.

The opposition's suspicion is not entirely unreasonable as a political instinct, even if it overstates the specific significance of Wednesday's briefing. Prime Minister Pashinyan made it clear that Tigranashen was labelled before the process of normalisation started, adding that the problem of Tigranashen would be solved as part of the process of border delimitation, when the question will be settled as to whether there will be an exchange of territory or its return. What makes the opposition's reaction politically potent is precisely what makes it analytically excessive: the name change, taken out of context, looks like pre-emptive capitulation. However, in context, it is just the prime minister employing the language of a process that was agreed upon. In Armenian domestic politics, the difference between the two is sometimes not as wide as it ought to be.

Pashinyan invokes a particular precedent that reminds me of a section from Europe's history, even if he does not state this explicitly. As the dispute arose over the border demarcation between France and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1820 in the process of signing the Treaty of Kortrijk, none of the parties tried to use their feudal inheritance rights and emotional links to the disputed land. They dispatched commissions of experts, studied administrative maps, and delineated a border that could be defended in court instead of being emotionally appealing. The resulting border did not satisfy everybody living in the area. However, it was stable. The problem in the South Caucasus region bears a heavy burden in human losses, uprooted communities, identity politics, and other factors that no Western European dispute has had for two centuries. However, the administrative principle is still the same.

In calling Kyarki instead of Tigranashen, Pashinyan is not wiping out Armenian history; he is merely using the language of the agreement that both governments have accepted to use, just like European nations have done many times before in choosing to solve their territorial disputes via demarcation rather than dispute. The name of the place on the map is different from the name of the community living there. It is this very thing that makes the Kortrijk approach effective.

Government programme

On the same day, Pashinyan presented the 2026–2031 government programme, the five-year policy framework for his fourth term, at a government meeting. The programme states that the Armenian government will continue the delimitation of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border while working toward the institutionalisation of peace between the two countries, including the signing of a peace treaty and other legal agreements, as well as expanding contacts between civil society and business communities of both countries. The programme also commits to pursuing the normalisation of relations with Türkiye, including the establishment of diplomatic relations, the opening of the land border, and the construction of at least two modern border checkpoints, one of which, the Margara checkpoint, has already been prepared on the Armenian side.

Taken together, the Kyarki briefing and the government programme represent something that would have been extraordinary to predict five years ago and feels, in the South Caucasus of August 2026, inevitable - which is peace. The same programme maintains multilateral relations with Russia; Pashinyan has not severed those ties and has been careful not to make the Western orientation a zero-sum choice, while deepening strategic partnerships with the EU and the United States. The "balanced" positioning that critics call equivocation and supporters call realism is written into the government programme as formal policy.

Larger argument on peace deal

What Pashinyan is doing, through the use of Kyarki and the government program alike, is operationalizing an argument articulated in a draft analytical brief that has been floating around in Yerevan's policy community as "pragmatism over mythology": that Armenian statehood cannot survive on 20th-century ethno-nationalist romanticism, that recognising the 1991 administrative borders strips away irredentist traps and locks in international legitimacy, and that a constitution free of territorial claims is a precondition for Euro-Atlantic integration, not a betrayal of national identity.

The opposition which responded to Wednesday’s press conference with claims of betrayal is an opposition that received 33% of the vote in June – restrained but not irrelevant. The ARF, the Apostolic Church, and the lobbying groups in Congress and France that have opposed the peace initiative in Washington and Paris cannot be dismissed without resonance back home. There is also the constitutional reform required by Azerbaijan, eliminating any mention of Karabakh in the founding document, which still needs a referendum that Civil Contract cannot initiate without opposition backing. Pashinyan can use “Kyarki” at his press conference. He cannot, however, remove the word “Karabakh” from the constitution. The gap between the two is where the peace process stands today – and probably will stay for some time to come.