Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wrote on his Facebook page about the negotiations on Karabakh during the hostilities, revealing the reasons why Yerevan refused to stop the Second Karabakh war until after Shusha was liberated by the Azerbaijani army.
As it turned out, the reason was the unwillingness of Armenia's political forces to be involved in the capitulation on the terms discussed around October 20, while Azerbaijan was ready to stop the fighting immediately.
Pashinyan wrote that on October 19 he received a call from the Armenian politician Arayik Harutyunyan, who portrays the head of the fake "NKR" regime created in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, and said that the war must be stopped. Harutyunyan conveyed not only his opinion to Pashinyan, but also those of the ex-leaders of the NKR Arkady Ghukasyan and Bako Sahakyan, as well as the ex-presidents of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan, who unanimously supported the end of hostilities against Azerbaijan.
Then the prime minister called Russian President Vladimir Putin, who offered him the following conditions: postpone the solution of the issue of the status of Karabakh, withdraw the Armenian troops from the occupied regions around it, and deploy Russian peacekeepers, not inside Karabakh, but along its borders and in the Lachin corridor.
Pashinyan passed the proposal to Harutyunyan, and he agreed.
However, later, at a meeting with the participation of representatives of extra-parliamentary forces, where the Armenian PM presented his decision, many were against it, and later in social networks they began to call Pashinyan a traitor. Then he convened a meeting of the Security Council with the participation of representatives of parliamentary factions, the President of Armenia and the Catholicos of All Armenians. "I assured the opposition that I am not going to impose any responsibility on them – I just want to inform that I intend to take such a step so that it does not turn out that I want to do something in secret from the people," he explained.
Then he called Putin again, saying that he agreed to the proposed plan, the Russian president promised to discuss this issue with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev by morning.
In the morning Bako Sahakyan and Arkady Ghukasyan told Pashinyan that they oppose any agreement without specifying the status of Karabakh. The prime minister thinks they said this on behalf of the former presidents of Armenia. "But none of this was important, since I had already made a decision and was going to bring the matter to the end," Pashinyan specified.
During the third conversation with Putin, Pashinyan learned that Ilham Aliyev agreed to almost all the conditions, with the exception that peacekeepers should not be deployed along the borders of the former NKAO AzSSR, but along the length of the de facto line of contact, since Hadrut and Talysh are under Azerbaijani control and they do not agree to retreat from their positions, and also Armenia had to undertake an obligation to open access to Shusha for Azerbaijani citizens.
At that time, on the 20th of October, none of the Armenian politicians agreed to the return of the Azerbaijani population to Shusha. "So the ceasefire became impossible. I said that even if I agree on Hadrut, I cannot imagine the possibility of surrendering Shusha. The President of Russia was surprised why I was against the return of Azerbaijanis," Pashinyan recalls, adding that under this condition, Shusha would again become Azerbaijani city, because the majority of the population in it have always been Azerbaijanis.
As a result of such indecision of Armenian politicians, the war continued for another three weeks, during which many Armenian soldiers and officers died. On October 20, while Yerevan was just trying to present itself as a loser, the Azerbaijani army liberated the city of Zangilan, completing the de-occupation of the Iranian-Azerbaijani border and moving up to the southwestern section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. On October 26, shortly after Pashinyan's refusal to surrender, the city of Gubadli was liberated, and on November 8, the liberation of Shusha was announced. The next day, Armenia surrendered and peace was concluded on tougher terms than those proposed by Vladimir Putin and Ilham Aliyev around October 20.