Azerbaijan Gained Legitimate Rights in the International Community for War: Artak Zakaryan

All three presidents of Armenia and the current prime minister have never been 'zero-sum.' If there had been a 'zero-sum approach,' negotiations would not have happened either. This was stated by former Deputy Minister of Defense Artak Zakaryan in an interview with armdaily.am.

“They came and completely disrupted the negotiation process to the extent that even the co-chairs of the Minsk Group found it very difficult to understand, both in terms of propaganda and actual actions and approaches. We were told something by Lavrov or another co-chair while these people said there was no such thing. The entire logic turned out to be that Azerbaijan gained legitimate rights for war in the international community because Armenia was no longer constructive,” Zakaryan said.

In response to the remark that the current authorities claim that Serzh Sargsyan made promises to Azerbaijan, Zakaryan replied, “Why were they not talking about this in November 2018 after leaving the elevator? Why wasn’t this mentioned in 2019, before February 2020? Why did they suddenly think it was time to bring Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table if we start to place their claims in any context—we will deeply get lost in a false reality? Let’s stop living in a pseudo-reality. Our life is in a completely different situation, while we are in a pseudo-reality; as if the authorities said something, the facts are stubborn.”

Regarding the promises, he emphasized that Serzh Sargsyan simply stated that promises could not have existed. “It followed from the negotiation logic that Aliyev found himself in a deadlock in negotiations; that’s why he tried to go through the path of war. As a result, the well-known provisions of Vienna and St. Petersburg were born, which worsened Azerbaijan's situation even more and Azerbaijan did not have the resources to wage war because Armenia was correctly positioned in the negotiation portfolio, and throughout the negotiations, Azerbaijan could not find any document that would accuse Armenia of anything until 2018 when the co-chairs of the Minsk Group started to make remarks to Armenia,” he added.