Participants in a two-month-old, civil-disobedience campaign demanding the resignation of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian over territorial concessions to archfoe Azerbaijan blocked streets in downtown Yerevan early on June 11.
Police said they had detained one activist for failing to comply with an order early on the second day of four days of nonstop protests called by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian in his bid to unseat and replace Pashinian.
The outspoken 53-year-old head of the Tavush Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church has attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators with his Tavush for the Motherland movement in an unprecedented challenge to Pashinian's six-year leadership.
Pashinian's Civil Contract party has a two-thirds majority in parliament that has helped insulate his government from public anger since a lightning offensive by Azerbaijan in September 2023 retook full control of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been controlled by ethnic Armenians with Yerevan's support for decades.
Pashinian insists that having a demarcated border provides an assurance against further conflict between the Caucasus neighbors.
A two-day-old protest encampment blocking a main avenue outside the National Assembly was mostly quiet on June 11, with small groups of protesters gathering alongside a dozen or so tents.
Galstanian's movement has also held rallies in other towns and cities since launching a defiant march from the village of Kirants in May.
Kirants is one of four abandoned villages formally handed over by Armenia this month that used to be part of Soviet Azerbaijan but which came under Armenian control in the early 1990s during the first Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
The demarcation altered the boundary in a way that affects the infrastructure of a number of Armenian border villages, a problem the government has pledged to fix within weeks.