Russia funds its war on Ukraine with oil. And to evade Western sanctions, Russia uses a shadow fleet of ships to illegally transport Russian oil to the world.
In Kyiv, I announced new sanctions on 109 oil tankers and vessels.
We are cutting off Russia’s war machine.— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 25, 2025
Month: February 2025
.. another night, another “negotiation” with the terrorist state https://t.co/pvYHg2XlJ6
— Alex Raufoglu (@ralakbar) February 25, 2025
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced last week that he has ordered the preparation of a new constitution, which will need the approval of the citizens of Armenia in a referendum.
I hope the majority of Armenian voters will reject the new constitution, thereby compelling him to resign. This is a golden opportunity to get rid of him. All previous efforts to remove him from office have failed over the past seven years.
The split among the opposition groups has prevented them from forming a coalition large enough to remove Pashinyan from office. Even though his popularity has considerably decreased in recent years, from 80% seven years ago to about 10% now, his ruling party’s political rating is larger than any single opposition group. Many excuses have been made for not uniting, but none of them are more important than the need to save the country. Regrettably, with its disunity, the opposition is keeping Pashinyan in power.
To form a successful anti-Pashinyan coalition, no one group should try to dominate. The leadership of the coalition should be rotated until new elections are held. A shadow government should be composed of all the opposition groups based on professional expertise.
The groups should temporarily set aside all their internal differences and unite to save the nation. Should Armenia no longer exist, none of these groups’ ideologies will matter. Once they save the country, they can go back to pursuing their own goals.
Knowing Pashinyan’s egotistical modus operandi, he will crisscross Armenia to ensure that citizens vote for the new constitution. He will leave no stone unturned to achieve his objective, using pressure and threats. He has the resources of the government at his disposal to carry out a vast campaign and resort to vote tampering or collecting a large amount of campaign contributions that exceed the legal limit, just as his party did during the last Yerevan City Council elections. This is a critical goal for Pashinyan, because Azerbaijani Pres. Ilham Aliyev has made it clear that without a new Armenian constitution, he will refuse to sign the “peace treaty” that Pashinyan has been begging for. Pashinyan needs that signed piece of paper to fool voters in the 2026 elections into thinking that he has brought them “peace,” even though it will not last long.
Initially, Pashinyan dismissed Aliyev’s demand to change the constitution as interference in Armenia’s internal affairs. Furthermore, Pashinyan said that there is no such need, as the draft of the peace treaty contains a clause that both countries agree to recognize each other’s territorial integrity. In the case of a dispute, the terms of the peace treaty will take precedence over their respective constitutions. Pashinyan added that Azerbaijan’s constitution itself contains indirect references to demanding territories from the Republic of Armenia. However, Pashinyan said that he will not ask Azerbaijan to revise its constitution.
In addition to changing Armenia’s constitution, Pashinyan has accepted the following demands from Aliyev: Armenia will turn over certain villages located inside Armenia to Azerbaijan; Azeris who formerly lived in enclaves inside Armenia will return and live there; the OSCE Minsk group will be disbanded; EU border monitors will depart from Armenia; Armenia will drop its international lawsuits against Azerbaijan; and the road from the eastern part of Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan will be a corridor under Azeri sovereignty, rather than a mere road (while objecting to the corridor, Pashinyan has agreed to facilitate the access).
Even though the 2020 agreement allows both Armenia and Azerbaijan to cross each other’s territory, Pashinyan has repeatedly said that Azeris are welcome to cross Armenia, without once stating that the agreement should be implemented reciprocally.
Armenia’s Justice Minister Srbuhi Galyan said last week that the new constitution will be ready before the June 2026 parliamentary elections. It is not clear if the electorate will be asked to vote on the constitution at the same time as voting for the parliament members or after that election.
There is nothing wrong with amending the constitution from time to time as the need arises, but to be compelled to write a brand new one at the enemy’s demand is totally unacceptable. It is critical that Armenian voters reject the new constitution. A no vote is a vote of no confidence in the prime minister. He can no longer remain in his position after the people reject his key initiative. He will have no choice but to resign.
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Sadly, recognition of human atrocities on the magnitude of the Armenian Genocide is a privilege reserved for relative peacetime, which proved elusive during much of the 20th century. For Armenians specifically, ongoing episodic pogroms occurred pre-1915 and continued until 1923, at which time the world unwittingly hurtled toward its most volatile and deadly period in recorded human history. Given the chaos, Genocide survivors had scant opportunity to process the unfathomable events perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire.
Practicality displaced emotion, as Armenians had to determine their most pragmatic option going forward: where to go in the world, how to get there and how to become economically relevant in a foreign land. They needed to escape the unbearable pain and grief of the past and the possibility of more uncertainty and misfortune going forward. No concerted effort to campaign for Genocide recognition could be mounted while our ancestors were preoccupied with where to resettle and how to build a prosperous future.
Much academic study is written about the psychological effects of experiencing such a traumatic event. Perhaps grief and suffering were obscured, both consciously and unconsciously, in order to blunt the pain. Perhaps our ancestors were stunned, leading to an emotional inertia. These effects are deep-rooted and can be perpetuated for many years.
Armenians did garner immediate Western endorsement and press at the time of the Genocide; however, World War I and ultimate U.S. involvement moved Ottoman atrocities off the front pages. It was not until 1944 that Polish-Jewish academic Raphael Lemkin coined the phrase “genocide,” though he did not refer specifically to the Armenians. By that time, the horrors of the Holocaust were starting to emerge, and that became the topic of the day.
The Genocide did, however, induce the establishment of a far-reaching and robust diaspora, especially in France, Russia, South America, the United States and the Middle East. However effective these growing tendons were at disseminating Ottoman atrocities, progress was gradual.
As Mr. Peter Balakian duly noted in his article for the Armenian Weekly, Turkey obstructed recognition efforts by exploiting the chaotic onset of World War I and, in the ensuing years, staging a systematic campaign of denial and gaslighting. History carves out strange alliances. This is no more evident than post-World War I when the Allied Powers had to court what was left of the Ottoman Empire due to its strategic location vis-a-vis an encroaching Russia and a more volatile Middle East.
The Republic of Turkey filled that void. Realpolitik dictated that the Republic of Turkey could not be outright blamed, shamed and held accountable for the unspeakable crimes committed against the Armenian people. Turkey had been rendered unassailable, which in itself was an equally egregious crime.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, global chaos and suffering reached inconceivable heights. Europe was devastated, among other regions of the world. Astonishingly, the Turks took indecency several standard deviations higher by blaming the Armenians for their unfortunate fate, citing their alliance with Russia. Even more astonishingly, they used the specious argument that it was wartime, and many innocent Turks had died as well. The Ottoman Empire shamelessly used the cover and chaos of current events to dilute and deny their atrocities.
Incredibly, the attitude of some non-Jewish Europeans after the Holocaust was that their Christian and Protestant populations had also been decimated in the two World Wars, so why should they feel sorry for the Jews? Such rationale did not help promote the Genocide recognition effort.
Finally, as Mr. Balakian also noted, the 1945 Nuremberg trials, followed by the decolonization movements in Africa, triggered a thawing of recognition inertia. The mid-1960s saw the crescendo of the African-American civil rights movement and its intellectual cousins—women’s rights, anti-war protests, gay rights and environmental movements.
American culture drastically embraced change, at long last providing a clearer path for Armenians to make their tragic story known to the world. In 1965, the first April 24th Genocide Remembrance Day gathering was held in New York City’s Times Square, petitioned by about 40 parishioners from New York and New Jersey and endorsed by the Knights of Vartan fraternity.
In my childhood and early adolescence during the 1960s and early 1970s, the Armenian Genocide was more a concept than an actual event to my young mind. I would often ask my paternal grandmother, with whom I was very close, what exactly the Turks had done. Why didn’t my father have any relatives, like my maternal grandparents did, who had been fortunate enough to emigrate to America prior to 1915? Who better to ask than a family member who had actually experienced it?
But the second she heard the word “Turks,” I sensed, even at my young age, immediate revulsion. She would swing her arm in an upward motion, thrust her head down and quietly utter, “Go-ddam Tur-ks.” I will never forget that look on my grandmother’s face. She did not want me to see the pain in her expression. She would not discuss it. She did not want to relive it. Above all, she did not want to frighten me with it.
In my later years, I understood that my grandmother was trying to protect my impressionable mind from being desecrated by the same hate, pain and suffering inflicted upon her entire family during the Genocide. She wanted me to grow up “clean,” tabula rasa, with no emotional baggage and nothing to fear in life—a privilege never bestowed upon her and her family.
What tremendous sacrifices our ancestors made for us, enabling us to lead such charmed lives. How lucky we are to have descended from them.
Peter Hamptian has a bachelor’s degree in economics with a minor in English from Rutgers College and a master’s degree in international finance from Columbia University School of International Affairs. He has worked in finance since 1985.
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