Nikol Pashinyan Identifies the Biggest Mistake

As every day, this morning I had a phone conversation with the president of Artsakh. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced this during a session of the National Assembly today.
“I am pleased to note that a fairly good pace of repatriation of the population is beginning to be recorded, of course within the thresholds we have, and currently the number of returnees over the past week has exceeded 1,000 a day, and the pace is increasing. The most important task ahead is to support the return of the people of Artsakh, to restore the homes of those whose houses have been damaged, and to get the economy working. This is the most important task that the government of Armenia and the government of Artsakh should focus on. The involvement of volunteers in this process is also very important. It is expected that today the road through the Lachin Corridor to Stepanakert will open and operate uninterruptedly, which will undoubtedly facilitate free communication,” said Pashinyan.
In response to MP Hayk Sargsyan's question regarding government shortcomings, the Prime Minister noted, “I can say that if we try to formulate our mistake over the last 2.5 years, I think it is as follows: we must acknowledge that we have been unable to fill everything we needed to fill. For example, in the air defense system, we have made significant progress, which has been publicly announced. We have acquired TOR systems, we have acquired modernized ASA systems, and so on. However, the development of events has shown that all these are not sufficient to meet the modern challenges due to the simple reason that new factors have emerged in recent months that have somewhat changed the balance of power in that sector. In general, if we talk about Armenia's strategic mistake, I can say the following: our biggest mistake — I am not talking about any specific government, but rather about our overall perception — has been that we believed we could merge two approaches. One approach is to exclude the possibility of war, and the other approach is that we won't lose a single inch of land. We should have understood that we need to have a scenario and prepare for that scenario. Our biggest mistake has been the belief that we could stretch time indefinitely.”