YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Armenia’s three former presidents on Monday again accused Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of lying to try to absolve himself of blame for the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh following his renewed claims about past peace proposals made by the United States, Russia and France.
In a Facebook post, Pashinyan claimed that all peace plans drafted by the three mediating powers from 1994 onward were about “returning Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.” He said that his “big mistake” was not to make this clear to Armenians after coming to power in 2018.
The offices of former Presidents Levon Ter-Petrosian, Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian unanimously countered that Pashinyan continues to distort the history of the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiation process that had for decades been mediated by the U.S., Russian and French co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group.
“He uses every opportunity, every speech to try to clear his guilt for the destruction of Artsakh,” Levon Zurabyan, the deputy chairman of Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress party, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“The blood of our fallen soldiers is on his hands and the loss of all of Artsakh is also on him,” said Zurabyan. “This guilt, this responsibility will haunt him for the rest of his life.”
“Every [settlement] variant that had been put on the table since 1991 … was much better than the situation we have now,” said Artur Khachatryan, a senior member of the Hayastan alliance led by Kocharian.
Khachatryan repeated opposition claims that Pashinyan precipitated the 2020 war with Azerbaijan with his erratic policies and reckless statements on the Karabakh conflict.
Most of the Karabakh peace proposals were based on so-called Madrid Principles which the U.S., Russian and French mediators originally put forward 2007. This framework agreement, repeatedly modified in the following decade, upheld the Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination while calling for their withdrawal from Azerbaijani districts around Karabakh occupied in the early 1990s.
Pashinyan has repeatedly criticized the Madrid Principles since the 2020 war. In particular, he claimed in 2021 that the mediating powers sought a “surrender of lands” to Azerbaijan and offered the Armenian side nothing in return.
The Russian Foreign Ministry bluntly denied the claim at the time. It argued that the proposed deal stipulated that Karabakh’s internationally recognized status would be determined through a future referendum and envisaged firm security guarantees for its ethnic Armenian population.
Armenian opposition leaders say that Pashinyan made the disastrous war inevitable by rejecting the last version of the Madrid Principles. In 2021, Serzh Sarkisian publicized the secretly recorded audio of a 2019 meeting during which Pashinyan said he opposes that peace plan because it would not immediately formalize Karabakh’s secession from Azerbaijan. The premier said he is ready to “play the fool or look a bit insane” in order to avoid such a settlement.
The opposition also holds him responsible for Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war and Azerbaijan’s recapture of Karabakh in September 2023. Pashinyan has put the blame on ex-Presidents Sarkisian and Kocharian.
