Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan responded to the responses of officials of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) to the statements that he made during his online press conference on Dec. 24. He particularly wrote the following on his Facebook page:

“Certain responses to and comments on my interview on Dec. 24 are bewildering, to say the least, and here are the reasons why:

1. During the interview, I talked about the content of the negotiations that existed before I became Prime Minister in 2018. Consequently, I couldn’t have had any impact on the emergence of that content.

2. In response to a question, I refuted the statement of former President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan according to which the content for negotiations left by the former authorities guaranteed that Nagorno-Karabakh would remain Armenian. I refuted this because during those negotiations it was recorded that the Azerbaijanis having resided in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast during the Soviet era had the right to participate in making the decision on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh as residents of Nagorno-Karabakh. Consequently, if they are residents of Nagorno-Karabakh according to the content of the negotiations, they should have resided in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Armenian side has never objected this content before the revolution in 2018.

3. As for the status that Nagorno-Karabakh had before the potential referendum on status, in this interview, I said in 2016 the mediators had presented three packages for negotiations (one before the Four-Day Artsakh War in April 2016, and the other two — later) where, unlike the Kazan document of 2011, the phrase “Nagorno-Karabakh shall obtain an interim status” was missing. In the third of those three documents, which was presented in August 2016, there was a provision stating that the decision on the legal and practical mechanisms for organizing life in Nagorno-Karabakh would be made by the United Nations Security Council, consulting with the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office. This is what I considered a catastrophe in the process of negotiations because it is clear that the United Nations Security Council would make all decisions with the logic of the resolutions that it had previously adopted with regard to the Nagorno-Karabakh issue where Nagorno-Karabakh was recognized as a part of Azerbaijan.

4. By taking this and several other major problems into consideration I claimed from the podium of the National Assembly that before I became Prime Minister in 2018, with the existing content of the negotiations and realities, Artsakh had lost the opportunities to not be a part of Azerbaijan, both in theory and in practice.

5. When I became Prime Minister, I didn’t adapt to this, but fought against it. This is also why the war broke out.

6. Today the people who are telling me I shouldn’t negotiate on behalf of Nagorno-Karabakh are the people who had been criticizing me for saying that I don’t have the mandate to negotiate on behalf of Nagorno-Karabakh since 2018.

7. I understand that many respected people are complaining about the content of the negotiations that served as a cause and effect of the war in 2016 now. At the time, they were either unaware or had no right to complain. I am also complaining about that content, and I did everything I could to fight against that. I am sorry, but I can’t conceal the truth,” he wrote.