I was careless when I made a statement about Shushi that I wasn’t supposed to make. This is what Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan said during his visit to Aragatsotn Province yesterday, touching upon the sensational statement that he had made about Shushi in the National Assembly a few months ago.

“Today the people who criticized me for my statement have become the biggest so-called defenders of Shushi. Who visited Shushi in 2020? What have we Armenians done in Shushi over the past 30 years? Yes, I made the wrong statement in terms of the way I made the statement, but I didn’t say anything wrong in terms of content because, for those people, Baden-Baden was a nice city to visit, not Shushi in Nagorno-Karabakh. They built places like Shushi in all places around the world, but as far as possible from Shushi,” he said.

When a citizen told him that Ruben Hayrapetyan has built a house in Shushi, Pashinyan said the following in response: “Yes, sure, an oligarch was tricked and taken there and forced to build a house, or he wasn’t tricked, I don’t know. This is the reality.”

During a question-and-answer session with government officials in the National Assembly on January 20, Pashinyan declared the following: “I would like to call your attention to the fact that, before the signing, 90 and more percent of the population of Shushi was Azerbaijani. So, you want to say that the city of Shushi with a population of 90 and more percent Azerbaijanis was an Armenian city with that status?”