“First of all, I would like to welcome the president of Kazakhstan, Sadyr Japarov, to Armenia once again,” Pashinian said in a statement to the press read out by him after their talks.

The Armenian government gave no reason for the ensuing sacking of the head of its protocol service, Gagik Vanoyan. It was thus not immediately whether he lost his job because of Pashinian’s embarrassing gaffe. Vanoyan headed the service for almost four years.

Japarov combined an official visit to Armenia with his participation in the COP17 Biodiversity Conference that began its work in Yerevan late last week. Three other foreign heads of state or government, including Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, also attended the opening session of the United Nations forum.

Vahagn Melikian, a retired senior diplomat who had run the Armenian protocol service from 2000-2006, said the fact that Vanoyan was fired in the middle of the COP17, which brought together hundreds of foreign dignitaries, is extraordinary in itself.

“Even if any mistakes are made, they usually wait until an official event is over and then try to understand what the problem was,” Melikian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.

“Over the last eight years [of Pashinian’s rule,] there have been many dismissals ranging from those responsible for the prime minister’s protocol to staff at the Foreign Ministry,” he said. “And all those who were dismissed were professional diplomats. So who is to blame: the diplomats themselves or the person who dismissed them and who has no clue about protocol?”

Melikian, who is a well-known critic of Pashinian, said at the same time that Vanoyan is not a professional diplomat and should have therefore not been appointed to that post in the first place.