In the Ararat region of Armenia, there exists a small village that occupies a land area of around eight square kilometres and lies next to the M2 Highway, which connects the northern and southern parts of the country and even stretches into Iran. This place is called Tigranashen. However, since the Soviet era, the village's official name has been changed from its earlier Azerbaijani name, Kyarki, to its current name, Tigranashen.
At the public meeting on Wednesday, Nikol Pashinyan referred to this place as Kyarki. The opposition in Armenia took it as a sign of surrender of the country by Pashinyan. Pashinyan reacted as though he had stated an administrative fact.
Both reactions tell you something real about the state of Armenia in August 2026. Speaking at the briefing on August 20, Pashinyan said: "On the maps existing at the time of the adoption of the Alma-Ata declaration, Artsvashen is a territory of Armenia, while Kyarki, Baghanis-Ayrum, Barkhudarlu, Yukhari Askipara are not the territory of Armenia. This is a fact that we are dealing with." Armenia's territory is 29,743 sq km according to the 1991 Alma-Ata declaration, which was adopted as the basis of the delimitation process and which was the main principle of a commission agreement signed in August 2024 and approved in October.
That calculation includes Artsvashen, the Armenian village under Azerbaijani control since the First Karabakh War. However, it does not include Kyarki and the other Azerbaijani enclaves surrounded by Armenian territory. Pashinyan was not making a concession.
He was reading the map that both governments agreed to use. The substitution of "Kyarki" for "Tigranashen" is, in the technical context of border delimitation, a statement of legal reference rather than a claim of cultural ownership. When a prime minister uses the administrative toponym that appears on the 1991 Soviet maps that form the legal basis of the delimitation process, he is using the language of the document.
That is what Pashinyan was doing. Armenia's opposition, including ARF lawmaker Kristine Vardanyan, argued that cartographic changes to the village's name, including Google Maps relabelling it, could occur only based on information from official or institutional channels, and linked the issue to broader concerns about what the government may have privately agreed with Azerbaijan. The opposition's suspicion is not entirely unreasonable as a political instinct, even if it overstates the specific significance of Wednesday's briefing.
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