“Don’t you dare say I surrendered Karabakh!”, shouted Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan a few weeks ago at a refugee from that territory with whom he started arguing on the Yerevan metro. In September 2023, Azerbaijan invaded the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, a territory in dispute since the fall of the Soviet Union, and expelled the more than 100,000 ethnic Armenian inhabitants who remained there. Neither Pashinyan, nor Karabakh’s ally Vladimir Putin, nor any leader from the Western world did anything to prevent it. That defeat is still an open wound today for tens of thousands of displaced people and a national trauma that the Armenian candidate for re-election, in Sunday’s legislative elections, is trying to bury.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a peace agreement at the White House on Friday. Sitting between the two leaders was US President Donald Trump, who is hoping to score points toward the Nobel Peace Prize. "Thirty-five years of death and hatred, and now it will be love and success together," the Republican celebrated, also taking the opportunity to once again speak about the war in Ukraine and assert that it could end "very soon." He has been saying this for six months. Even so, he again accepted some of the Kremlin's demands to end the conflict and said that "a certain exchange of territories for the benefit of both parties" will be necessary.