Levon Ter-Petrosyan Told Pashinyan in Summer 2018: 'You Must Give Up the Territories'

If we were guided by the obsession of retaining power, we would not have offered to hold snap parliamentary elections back in December 2020. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this while presenting the report on the implementation of the government program for 2020 in the National Assembly.

“If it were so, we wouldn’t have initiated snap elections now either, of course, as a result of joint decisions with parliamentary forces and the President of Armenia. We are not keeping the power due to an obsession, nor for our own sake, but for the people, because we have an obligation to return it to the people,” he said.

The Prime Minister also addressed the question from Anna Kostanyan, a member of the LHK faction, regarding Ter-Petrosyan's statement that Pashinyan is a national disaster: “The first president has his own perception of the Artsakh issue, which we know from his article 'War or Peace: The Moment of Seriousness' published in 1997. In the 1996 presidential elections, the first president participated under the slogan 'Victory, Stability, Progress,' and there was no talk of peace or the moment of seriousness at that time. Later, this concept was formulated with the contemporary vocabulary of the failed 1996 presidential elections, let’s say 'exit strategy.' I stated in my speech on Khorenatsi Street in the summer of 2016 that at least in 2016 he was accompanied by Serzh Sargsyan in the negotiation process.

You know that there was a meeting with the first president in the summer of 2018, and I can reveal what he told me: 'You must give up the territories'; but in exchange for what, for what reason, how? The first president's perception has not gone beyond this framework. The rest is already a matter of evaluation.”