YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Monday, November 10, announced that documents related to negotiations over the Nagorno-Karabakh issue will be made public before the end of the year, responding to criticism from his predecessors over his handling of the talks and the 2020 war with Azerbaijan.
In separate interviews over the weekend, former Presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan again accused Pashinyan of rejecting a viable peace plan and derailing internationally mediated talks with Azerbaijan. They claimed this was one of the major factors that led to the 2020 war, in which the Armenian side suffered a defeat.
The two former leaders also alleged that, after coming to power through mass street protests in 2018, Pashinyan mishandled army affairs and relations with Armenia’s allies, notably Russia. Both said the 44-day war could have been stopped earlier, which, they argued, would have put Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia in a much better position vis-à-vis Azerbaijan.
In a Facebook post on November 10, Pashinyan said the remarks by Kocharyan and Sargsyan “once again confirm that the Karabakh issue was used by certain forces as a rope to tie the Republic of Armenia to the ‘nearest tree.’”
“The rights of peoples, historical justice, and similar concepts were merely a smokescreen for the real objective,” he wrote.
According to the prime minister, all the proposals presented as efforts to “stop the war” were in fact aimed at tightening the leash. “The ultimate goal of this process of tightening the leash was to end Armenian statehood,” he said. “In that scenario, the Karabakh conflict was meant to conclude only with the loss of Armenia’s statehood. Thanks to the sacrifice of our martyrs and the historical intuition of our people in Armenia and Karabakh, the Republic of Armenia managed to escape that scenario.”
