Pashinyan Comments on Serge Sargsyan's Released Recording

Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan continues his campaign today in the Tavush region. In the town of Spitak, he addressed the recording released by the third President of Armenia, Serge Sargsyan.

“From what I have followed of the reactions, the public is a bit puzzled; they are asking questions, saying, 'Now we don’t understand, did Sargsyan want to cause damage or benefit?' What Serge Sargsyan has published fully and completely justifies our positions, our history over the last seven months. What is that history about? It is about the fact that in May 2018, I inherited a deformed situation regarding the negotiations on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue and what was the most significant problem was that the mediators expressed the same position on the roadmap for future developments and resolutions as Azerbaijan has expressed,” he said.

Pashinyan noted that this did not happen in 2018, but much earlier. He declared that the April war made the “territories for nothing” formula more serious. “We inherited the negotiation process in 2018 in a situation where the ‘territories for nothing’ formula was on the table; it is very important to state that the mediators and the international community, which we relied on for many years, have laid out the task of returning the territories for nothing,” he said.

Pashinyan claimed that there has never been a 5+2 formula. “Those two were the backup section through which this variant was to be formally conceded later to make this resolution acceptable for Azerbaijan,” he said.

The acting Prime Minister stated that Robert Kocharian sold the blood of the victims in exchange for his own power. “The formula ‘Karabakh for power’ was activated in 1998,” he said. Pashinyan noted that the recording is being published while forgetting to answer one question: “What happened that you sold lands for 5 billion dollars in Dubai, what happened to that topic?” He added, “Now they are blaming the opposite, now they are accusing us of not giving up the lands.”