Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday shared details of the Russian-mediated ceasefire talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev during the 2020 Artsakh war.
Speaking at a meeting of the parliamentary commission probing the war, Pashinyan said he signed a trilateral statement to end the war on the morning of November 9.
“As a result of discussions, we agreed on a text that said nothing about Shushi or the opening of a corridor through Armenia. It was about the cessation of hostilities, return of seven regions and deployment of Russian peacekeepers on the Lachin Corridor and in Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said.
“On the morning of November 9, I signed that text. Mind you, not at midnight, but on the morning of 9 November I signed the trilateral statement. However, it turned out that Azerbaijan refused to sign the document and instead laid out a number of new demands. The statement I signed in the morning was no longer valid,” Pashinyan stated, adding he categorically rejected a new version of the statement which envisaged the return of the enclaves in Armenia’s Tavush Province to Azerbaijan.
“Sometime later, it turned out that an agreement had been reached to remove that point from the document. At the same time, at around midnight, reports about intensified hostilities and a large number of drones above Stepanakert began to circulate. Eventually, after difficult and long discussions I signed the document you all know about, which, of course, was worse than the one I had signed in the morning, but was better than the other proposed versions, which envisaged either the creation of a corridor through Meghri or the return of the Tavush enclaves,” he noted.