Armenian police on Tuesday detained nearly 300 opposition supporters who tried to block the streets of the capital Yerevan, which has been gripped by anti-government protests for a month.
Since mid-April, opposition parties have been organizing rallies demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan over his handling of a territorial dispute with Azerbaijan.
On Tuesday morning, hundreds of opposition supporters tried to block streets in central Yerevan, an AFP journalist testified.
The Armenian police department said that “286 people who disobeyed law enforcement officers’ legal demands were briefly detained.”
Archenemies Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars, in 2020 and in the 1990s, over the long-contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Six weeks of fighting in the fall of 2020 claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the truce.
The pact was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation and sparked weeks of anti-government protests, prompting Pashinyan to call early parliamentary elections that his Civil Contract party won last September.
Opposition parties have accused Pashinyan of planning to cede parts of Karabakh still under Armenian control to Baku.
Ethnic Armenian separatists from Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflict claimed some 30,000 lives.