Serzh Sargsyan on the Notable Meeting Between Karen Karapetyan and Nikol Pashinyan

Я aware of one meeting that took place in Yerevan, in a detention center. This was stated by the third president of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, on the air of "Armenews," referring to the details of the famous meeting in 2018 between Nikol Pashinyan and Karen Karapetyan.

“I do not consider it appropriate to publicly disclose what Karen Karapetyan told me. Perhaps Karen Karapetyan will talk about it,” Sargsyan said.

Regarding the observation of why Karen Karapetyan did not take advantage of the opportunity after Serzh Sargsyan's resignation, the third president of Armenia replied: “As for why Karen Karapetyan did not use the levers, I think it is for the same reason that I did not do it,” he said, and continued, “The meeting took place on the day of my resignation. I had the text of my resignation, which I showed to Karen Karapetyan. He looked at the text of the resignation and asked me to remove one sentence and one paragraph. I agreed. Thus, I had written in the resignation text: ‘the street movement is against my tenure, I am fulfilling your demand. I welcome the dialogue agreement between Nikol Pashinyan and Karen Karapetyan. Karen Karapetyan is a good leader; he is one of you, dear protesters, and dear non-protesters. He is the embodiment of experience and the future; help him.’ Since he was to replace me and did not want that sentence to be in my resignation text, I removed it. We then went to a consultation, from where Karen Karapetyan went to that meeting.

As for why Karapetyan disliked the mentioned paragraph, Serzh Sargsyan said, “Perhaps he thought that my kind words towards him could create a negative attitude towards him among the people, as there was a negative attitude towards me. If I say directly, it no longer mattered to me whether this sentence would remain or not, because it was a good wish for Karen Karapetyan.”

Sargsyan also noted that he has known Karapetyan for a long time and during their joint work, he has shown himself to be a decent person.