If Pashinyan Had Accepted Putin's Offer and Stopped the War on October 19, Shushi Would Have Remained Under Armenian Control: N. Zohrabyan

MP Naira Zohrabyan from the "Prosperous Armenia" faction has addressed Armenian sovereignty over Shushi in response to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's clarifications today.

“If Nikol Pashinyan had accepted Vladimir Putin’s offer and halted the war on October 19, which, by the way, Aliyev had agreed to, then Shushi would have remained under Armenian control. The death toll would not have been so catastrophic, because according to official numbers, we had 729 casualties by October 19. We would not have lost a significant part of Artsakh territory, as by then Turkish forces had only seized certain areas from the south of Artsakh,” she stated.

“If Nikol had accepted Putin’s offer and the war had stopped, thousands of bright young men would still be alive today. The potential return of Azerbaijani refugees to Shushi, which Nikol is now attempting to use to justify the surrender of Shushi, is merely a provincial bluff. If Shushi remained ours, under any security guarantees, not a single Azerbaijani would have returned to Shushi. It is the same as if Aliyev now declares that he is providing security guarantees and the Armenian population of Shushi can return to the city under Turkish control. Not a single Armenian would return. And that is a fact.”

“It is also a fact that the war could have stopped on October 19, and one person did not allow that. And that one person's name is Nikol. By the way, the mayor of Shushi recently announced that since 2008, the housing stock in Shushi has been exhausted and no Azerbaijani could return to Shushi, even technically,” she added.