Nikol Pashinyan Bears Personal Responsibility for Everything That Happened: Kocharyan

“We suffered a very heavy defeat in the war, which was a strong psychological blow for the society. There are serious issues including deep indifference, apathy, and problems in the economy and governance sectors. There is not a single area where we could express something positive, even to some extent. How can one lose such a war and have a country and society in normal condition?” said the second President of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan, in an interview with Vladimir Pozner.

In response to the question of whether he expected such a war while not being involved in the country's governance, Kocharyan stated, “Certainly, moreover, I have warned about this multiple times and publicly. Through the press, I warned both the public and the government. The fact is that almost all experts said that the policy being pursued in Armenia would inevitably lead to war.”

Regarding Pozner's observation that one could assume the authorities were confident they would win if a war started, the second president provided a negative response. “On the contrary, at the expert level, it was said that we were not ready for a complex war, while the authorities denied everything.”

Kocharyan believes that current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan bears personal responsibility for everything that happened. “We have had a conflict with Azerbaijan for many years around Nagorno-Karabakh—war, front lines, armies facing each other, exchanges of fire, that is to say, a process that implied some kind of decision. In recent years, the authorities led the negotiation process into a deadlock, and the deadlock was created by the initiative of the Armenian side, and where negotiations end, war begins. The understanding that we had already entered a risky phase, and that military actions could resume, was simply evident,” he noted.

When asked what the best-case scenario for the negotiations should have been, Kocharyan replied that, in reality, through negotiations, we could have arrived at a status for Nagorno-Karabakh in exchange for territories controlled by the Nagorno-Karabakh side. “There is the territory of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and territories that we call liberated, while mediators refer to them as occupied. These territories were included in Nagorno-Karabakh, but constitutionally, they were perceived as a buffer zone, a serious security zone, at the same time, they were the subject around which negotiations could be held regarding the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenian side presented new demands, starting from a new point, forgetting what had been before us, and then the formula emerged that no negotiations can take place without the participation of the representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh, and then ‘Artsakh is Armenia and that’s it.’ That is to say, in a very short period, with new preconditions, an impression was created that the Armenian side was withdrawing from negotiations,” said Kocharyan.

The second president noted that the current authorities do not understand that they are provoking, that all this was a simplistic method of escaping responsible, difficult negotiations.