I Personally Bear Responsibility for All This, I Continue to Bear and Will Bear It: Nikol Pashinyan

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated during a Facebook live broadcast that he personally and fully bears responsibility for the situation. “However, looking back, I know that those solutions were simply impossible for me and for you, and the fact is that we and our army fought to the end and selflessly in this war. Our soldiers, our officers, generals, the commander of the Defense Army Jalal Harutyunyan, Mikael Arzumanyan, the head of the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense Onik Gasparyan, many commanders who fought on the front line, and so on. But if there is such a result, we can say that, yes, not doing it that way may have been a mistake,” said Pashinyan.

Pashinyan noted that numerous measures have been taken over the past 2.5 years for the development of the army, but perhaps not all measures were effective during this war. “That the army has been at the center of government attention over the past 2.5 years is a fact. We could not put as much money into the army as we wanted,” Pashinyan said, adding that they failed to generate sufficient resources from anti-corruption cases to serve the interests of the army.

He stated that in this situation, we must focus on strengthening Armenia and Artsakh, acknowledging that we have fallen but have not knelt: “We stood resolutely until the last line on which we made our decision to avoid falling into the abyss. That was a painful but necessary and inevitable decision because without it our situation would have been much worse. I personally bear responsibility for all this, I continue to bear and will bear that responsibility. I would like to emphasize that, yes, I believe this is a great failure for us, a great catastrophe, a mourning for our lost lives, but I believe that Armenia and Artsakh must live and we must strengthen and empower ourselves,” Pashinyan added.