The leitmotif of 1998 was that then-President Levon Ter-Petrosyan considered it acceptable that the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) issue be resolved in phases, whereas subsequent Presidents Serzh Sargsyan, Robert Kocharyan, the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities were saying no, the issue shall be resolved in a package. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated about this Wednesday during the National Assembly (NA) debates on the execution of the 2021 program of the government of Armenia.

"The negotiation paper that is put on my table, the title was as follows: ‘On the first stage of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement and further steps.’ That is, the person [i.e., Serzh Sargsyan] who said that the phased solution is a defeat left a piece of paper on the negotiating table in 2018, the title of which is this. (…).

But always keep in mind that the question is whether or not Azerbaijan agrees with all this. They say we would have resolved the Karabakh issue this way, that way. Dear people, you should have resolved it! They present the ideas in the unsigned papers as a victory," said Pashinyan.

He recalled that Serzh Sargsyan had said about this matter from the NA rostrum.

"They tell me how it happened that you fell into the trap in 2019. Falling into the trap was that a negotiation package appears where Armenia is expected to now hand over seven regions to Azerbaijan. We were not in the trap; that paper recorded what Serzh Sargsyan announced from this rostrum. It was the result of his last negotiations because in 2019 we did not even start negotiations; we did not talk about substantive negotiations at all.

Today they say, ‘Could you have prevented the war?’ We could have prevented the war, as a result of which we would have had this same situation—of course, without casualties," Pashinyan said.