12:30, 20 June 2023
YEREVAN, JUNE 20, ARMENPRESS. Talks over what would become the 9 November 2020 trilateral statement had begun on 6 November 2020, Prime Minister Pashinyan told lawmakers on Tuesday.
“I agreed to start negotiations on this topic with one condition, that it won’t contain clauses relating to Shushi and a corridor through territory of Armenia, as well as offered to return Aghdam in exchange of Hadrut, which Azerbaijan had captured. This was the beginning of the process aimed at signing the trilateral statement. I understood that we had reached a turning point. If we were able to keep Shushi, it would be a turning point, if not, again it would be a turning point. But as of 8 November, as much as I was being told that a part of Shushi was still under our control, I realized that we were unable to completely bring it back. The President of Nagorno Karabakh was warning that Stepanakert was becoming vulnerable, and there was a risk that the Azerbaijanis, after solving the issue of Shushi, would attack Stepanakert from the direction of Shosh village, continuing towards Askeran and hitting the Defense Army defensive lines from the rear and invading into Haterk and Sotk. The talks were proceeding through the Russian President, I had over 20 phone calls with him on 8 October, and a total of 60 phone calls during the entire 44-day war. And very quickly it became known that Azerbaijan was not accepting the formula of exchanging Aghdam for Hadrut, and eventually as a result of discussions were reached a text where nothing was said about Shushi, nothing was said about a corridor through Armenia’s territory, but was stipulating the end of hostilities, the return of the seven regions, the creation of the Lachin Corridor and the deployment of Russian peacekeepers there and in Nagorno Karabakh,” Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan said he signed the text in the morning of 9 November but Azerbaijan refused to sign it and put forward new demands.
“The culmination was the evening of 9 November when it turned out that Azerbaijan was offering new amendments to the text that had been practically finalized. This meant that the text I had signed in the morning was no longer valid. But the moment the Russian President said that Azerbaijan wants to add a clause on the return of the enclaves of Tavush province, I declared that I rule out signing such document. And it was officially noted that we are not signing a document. Sometime later it turned out that an agreement was reached to remove that clause. At the same time, around midnight, we started to receive news about intensified military operations and that there were a large number of drones above Stepanakert. After all, after difficult and long discussions I signed the document you all know about, which, of course, is worse than the option I had signed in the morning on that same day, but was better than the rest of the proposed variants, one of which envisaged the Meghri corridor and the other the return of enclaves of Tavush province.”