Trump Adviser Meets with Catholicos Karekin II

It was not clear whether she discussed Pashinyan’s more than yearlong efforts to oust Karekin. The Armenian premier moved to reinvigorate his campaign, condemned by the church and the Armenian opposition as illegal, after his party’s victory in disputed parliamentary elections held in June.

“Slowly, systematically, millimeter by millimeter, painfully, we are going to see this through to the end,” he told reporters on Thursday. He reaffirmed his plans to enact “legislative amendments” for that purpose.

Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party announced the next day its decision to set up an hoc commission of the Armenian parliament tasked with investigating “the church’s failure to fulfill its unique mission.” The parliament’s two opposition groups have already made it clear that they will boycott the parliamentary inquiry they say violates the church’s separation from the state guaranteed by Armenia’s constitution.

The commission is supposed to look into a report released late last month by a government agency regarded by Pashinyan’s critics as one of his main propaganda mouthpieces. The report essentially repeats Pashinyan’s allegations against the top clergy and Karekin in particular.

The report has been dismissed by not only opposition leaders but also Armenian human rights activists. The latter say it is not backed up by factual evidence.

Pashinyan began pressuring Karekin to resign in June 2025 shortly after the Catholicos accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during an international conference in Switzerland. Three Armenian archbishops and one bishop were arrested in the following months on different charges strongly denied by them. Early this year, law-enforcement authorities also indicted but did not arrest Karekin himself as well as six other bishops.