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		</div><p>Armenia’s prime minister has set an early parliamentary election for June as he sought to defuse the country’s political crisis.</p>
<p>The opposition pushing for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation has demanded that he step down before the vote.</p>
<p>In a Facebook statement that followed his talks with the leader of an opposition faction in parliament, Mr Pashinyan said the parliamentary vote will be held on June 20.</p>
<p>The opposition was divided over the vote’s prospect.</p>
<p>Vazgen Manukyan, a veteran politician whom the opposition named as a prospective caretaker prime minister, rejected the move, while Artur Vanetsyan, the former head of the National Security Service, said his Homeland opposition party will take part in the election.</p>
<p>Armenia has been gripped by political tensions after suffering a humiliating defeat last year in an armed conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory within Azerbaijan that Armenia-backed separatists controlled for more than 25 years.</p>
<p>The opposition supporters have been blocking government buildings and barricaded streets to press the demand for Pashinyan’s resignation.</p>
<p>Mr Pashinyan has refused to step down, defending a November peace deal that ended the six weeks of fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh as the only way to prevent Azerbaijan from overrunning the entire region.</p>
<p>More than 6,000 people were killed in the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies within Azerbaijan but was under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.</p>
<p>The Russia-brokered peace deal let Azerbaijan reclaim control over large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas.</p>
<p>Mr Pashinyan has dismissed the opposition’s demand to step down before the vote.</p>
<p>The 45-year-old former journalist has retained significant public backing despite the defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh, with thousands rallying in his support to counter the opposition-led pressure for his resignation.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Mr Pashinyan rejected a court ruling that challenged his decision to dismiss the country’s top military officer, a legal controversy that deepened the nation’s political crisis.</p>
<p>The administrative court in the capital, Yerevan, ruled on Wednesday that the chief of the military’s General Staff, Colonel-General Onik Gasparyan, should stay on the job pending his appeal of the dismissal order.</p>
<p>A statement issued by Mr Pashinyan’s office dismissed the court’s ruling as unlawful. Col-Gen Gasparyan, meanwhile, showed up at his workplace on Thursday, according to his lawyer.</p>
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