In June 2025, hundreds of masked and armed security agents descended on the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin — the spiritual heart of Christianity’s oldest state church. Their target: Archbishop Mikael Adjapahyan. The faithful blocked the police, tocsin bells were rung, and agents were forced into retreat. The Church compared the raid to 1938 Soviet-era religious crackdowns. This was not an isolated incident — it was the culmination of a systematic campaign by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan against the Armenian Apostolic Church, one that has involved arrested archbishops, fabricated deepfake videos, and the liquidation of the Church’s television channel.
The arsenal deployed against the Church reads like an authoritarian playbook. Four archbishops have been arrested, including protest leader Bagrat Galstanyan on coup charges his lawyer calls “fiction.” The Catholicos himself was indicted and slapped with a travel ban timed to prevent him from attending a Bishops’ Synod in Vienna. Most disturbingly, an intimate video of Archbishop Arshak Khachatryan was leaked on Telegram — an examination later proved it was a deepfake, created by a “special program.” Despite this, Arshak was arrested at the very venue where he had come to report as a victim. Anna Hakobyan, the PM’s wife, called clergy “the country’s chief pedophiles” on television — yet not a single clergyman has been charged with pedophilia.
But the Church is not without sin. Catholicos Karekin II was essentially installed by the Kocharyan regime through electoral fraud in 1999. An ICIJ investigation revealed he held a Swiss bank account with over $1 million. An OCCRP investigation linked a close archbishop to a Cyprus offshore company redistributing $10.7 million. The Church systematically sided with former presidents after the 2020 war, and Archbishop Galstanyan openly met with both Kocharyan and Sargsyan. The government hired Mercury Public Affairs in Washington for $600,000 to attack the Church internationally, while the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention warned of “growing repression.” The truth is that both sides have weaponized this conflict ahead of the June 2026 elections — and ordinary Armenians are caught between a genuinely corrupt Church and a genuinely authoritarian government.