The Quote
The statement was delivered at a Kotayk-marz campaign event on 28 May 2026 and captured on video by Azatutyun.am. The Prime Minister's words: "We didn't give money to buy weapons -- we bought weapons at the price of the people's deprivation." In the Armenian original the phrasing is unambiguous: the funding for the rearmament came at a cost borne by the population, framed by the Prime Minister himself as deprivation (Õ¦Ö€Õ¯Õ¡Õ¶Ö„).
The remark is striking for being made by the head of the government that conducted the rearmament, on the campaign trail, on the day his own government staged the parade celebrating that rearmament. It is a rare instance of a sitting leader naming the social cost of his own signature defense achievement, in his own words, in the middle of a re-election campaign.
What the Confession Confirms
OWL's coverage of the Republic Day parade and of Robert Kocharyan's "other people's weapons" criticism documented the scale of the post-2020 procurement pivot: French radar, air-defense and armored vehicle packages; Indian Pinaka rocket systems, ATAGS howitzers, and Akash air-defense, in deals reported to exceed $1.5 billion. The Pashinyan Kotayk statement confirms the funding question that the parade visuals obscure: this hardware was not free, was not a gift, and was not financed without cost. It was financed, in the Prime Minister's own framing, at the price of the people's deprivation.
The Armenian state budget for 2026 is approximately 2.3 trillion AMD. Defense spending has risen sharply since 2020 as a share of that budget. The increase has come at the expense of the flexible-spending envelope that would otherwise fund social transfers, regional infrastructure, healthcare expansion, and education. The Kotayk confession is the Prime Minister acknowledging that tradeoff out loud.
The Same-Day Contradiction
On the morning of 28 May, the government staged a military parade in Republic Square under the Aragats tribune, displaying the hardware as a demonstration of sovereign strength. On the same day, in Kotayk, the head of that government described the same hardware as purchased at the price of the people's deprivation. The two framings are both his. The parade says: look at the strength we have built. The Kotayk statement says: this strength cost the people.
The contradiction is not necessarily a gaffe. It may be deliberate campaign positioning: claim the strength to nationalist voters, claim the sacrifice to economically stressed voters, and let the parade and the campaign stop carry different messages to different audiences. The Republic Square parade audience and the Kotayk campaign audience are not the same audience. The Prime Minister offered each the framing it wanted.
The Honest Accounting
Stripped of campaign framing, the accounting is this: Armenia lost a war in 2020 in significant part because its Russian-supplied air defenses could not counter drone warfare. The Pashinyan government responded by buying new systems from France and India at a cost exceeding $1.5 billion. That money came from a state budget that cannot do everything at once, so it came at the expense of social spending -- the deprivation the Prime Minister named in Kotayk. Whether that tradeoff was correct is a legitimate question voters will answer on 7 June.
What is not in dispute is that the Prime Minister has now, in his own words, confirmed the tradeoff exists. The parade that projected costless strength and the campaign stop that admitted the cost happened on the same day. OWL is putting both on the record because the government put both into the world on 28 May 2026, and the voter deciding on 7 June is entitled to weigh them together.
Sources: Azatutyun.am, 28 May 2026 (Pashinyan Kotayk video) · Azatutyun.am, 28 May 2026 (Kocharyan on parade weapons) · Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Armenia (2026 state budget) · SIPRI (Armenia defense expenditure)