YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Sparking opposition allegations of a deliberate sacrifice of Nagorno-Karabakh and thousands of Armenian lives, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on August 25 admitted that he rejected international proposals to end the Karabakh conflict before the 2020 war with Azerbaijan.
“Today I also want to answer a question that is perhaps the most important for understanding the history of the last seven years,” Pashinyan said in a weekend statement on the 35th anniversary of a declaration of independence adopted by Armenia’s first post-Communist parliament. “After all, why did Armenia, our government and I personally not make concessions before September 2020, which was the only theoretical opportunity to avoid a 44-day war?
“The key reason for this was that as a result of those concessions, all the threats and dependencies we had would have increased disproportionately, leading to the loss of Armenia’s independence and statehood. We adopted a strategy to preserve Armenia’s independence and make that independence real.”
Pashinyan clearly referred to peace plans jointly drafted by the United States, Russia and France and based on their so-called Madrid Principles of a Karabakh settlement. The three co-chairs of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group presented the conflicting sides with an updated version of the draft peace deal in 2019, one year after Pashinyan came to power. The latter reluctantly acknowledged this fact in February after repeated denials.
Armenian opposition leaders maintain that Pashinyan’s failure to accept that plan paved the way for the disastrous 2020 war and Azerbaijan’s subsequent recapture of Karabakh. Some of them seized upon his latest statement to accuse him of deliberately provoking the six-week war that left at least 3,800 Armenian soldiers dead.
“So he knowingly did not prevent the war as a result of which we suffered thousands of casualties, lost the Republic of Artsakh and a part of Armenia’s territory, and promised Azerbaijan a land corridor,” charged Artur Khachatryan, a lawmaker from the main opposition Hayastan alliance.
