Nikol Pashinyan answered at Thursday’s cabinet briefing, a day and a half after AZERTAC published the interview in which Aliyev argued for Metsamor’s closure with Azerbaijani electricity in its place. The plant’s operating period is established, Pashinyan said, including in agreements concluded before his government, and there is nothing new in this regard. Armenia’s strategy is 100 percent energy independence, built on solar and storage and sized for demand he framed around artificial intelligence factories. Azerbaijani electricity he declined to rule out: sometimes we may export, sometimes import, he said, partnership included, naming Turkey, Iran and Georgia in the same breath.
The sharpest claim went unengaged. Aliyev had said TRIPP construction has already begun and that Azerbaijani specialists have identified pylon sites inside Armenia; Pashinyan confirmed only that bilateral infrastructure work exists and that officials met in September 2025 and January 2026.
The week’s structural news sits beside the words. On Thursday Pashinyan signed the decree replacing Armen Grigoryan, Security Council secretary since 2018, with the former parliament speaker Alen Simonyan, and introduced him to the staff on Friday. Azatutyun’s weekend reporting, sourced to political circles, ties Grigoryan’s exit to failed backchannel talks in which Baku pressed a new Armenian constitution as its precondition for signing the peace treaty. That reading remains attributed; the departure and the appointment are fact.
Our strategy, in general, is to achieve 100 percent energy independence.
The ratification clock now has a date. The Constitutional Court will examine the TRIPP framework agreement on 15 September in written procedure, with judge Edgar Shatiryan as rapporteur, per Armenian court reporting; parliament sees the treaty only if the court clears it, so nothing reaches a ratification vote before mid-September.
And the pressure on Russian-held assets widened. Armenia’s Anti-Corruption Committee arrested four employees of Gazprom Armenia on Friday in a bribery case over gas connections in new buildings, with a state construction inspector under house arrest. Set beside the nationalisation of the electricity networks and the standoff over the railway concession, each of the three Russian-held infrastructure positions in Armenia is now under some form of state pressure. Moscow had not reacted by Monday morning.