The NSC Chief Who Once Called Concessions 'Betrayal'

This clip delivers a sharp then-and-now contrast built entirely from one official’s own words. Hovik reads from a 2012 MediaMax article by Arman Grigoryan, who years later served as head of Armenia’s National Security Council. In it Grigoryan wrote that negotiating with an enemy that wants to destroy Armenians and promising them concessions is a betrayal of the Armenian people, that any concession creating a threat to lives is betrayal, and that negotiating concessions is a crime against one’s own people.

The hosts set these quotes against the record: Grigoryan served through the 2020 war, through the 2022 occupation of internationally recognized Armenian territory, and through 2023, when Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) was ethnically cleansed of its more than 150,000 Armenian inhabitants. Asbed calls the reversal unbelievable, noting that anyone voicing such views today would risk jail under Pashinyan. Hovik argues the 2012 rhetoric reads like paid messaging from a figure who had led a Western-funded NGO.

Then comes the punchline the hosts describe as what really hurts: Arman Grigoryan was born in Martuni, in Artsakh. A man from the very homeland that was lost helped steer the policy that accompanied its loss, and now, they note, there are photographs of him seated across the table from Azerbaijani officials. For an audience tracking Armenian news, the fate of Artsakh, and the Civil Contract government, the segment is a compact, damning study in how public positions can invert. It also feeds the hosts’ recurring call to scrutinize Western-funded NGOs and the officials who emerged from them.