VIDEO: I Could Not Convince Myself That Serzh Sargsyan and Robert Kocharian Are Exaggerating, Says Pashinyan

Negative feelings prevail in our collective perception of the year 2021. This was stated by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during a discussion in the National Assembly on the government's performance report for 2021 on April 13.

He mentioned that the number of victims from the 44-day war currently stands at 3,825. Most of their bodies were discovered, identified, and buried in 2021.

"The national flags continuously waving in the cemeteries are the main symbol of 2021, as well as the question that never leaves us: why did this happen? I must answer this question myself. I have initially accepted my guilt and responsibility for both the war and the defeat, but I do not accept—nor do I acknowledge—the accusations directed at me by the opposition since November 9, 2020, of ceding land and thus committing treason," the Prime Minister stated.

He noted that in a recent interview, he hinted that if they want to attribute an objective accusation to him, it should be not for ceding land, but for not ceding land. "Yes, I want to confess that perhaps I am guilty of that. I am guilty for not standing in front of our society in 2018-2019 and not voicing that all our distant and close friends expect us to hand over the seven known territories to Azerbaijan in one configuration or another and lower the bar we set for the status of Artsakh," Pashinyan admitted.

"I am guilty for not telling our people clearly that the international community unequivocally recognizes Azerbaijan's territorial integrity and expects us to recognize it, they expect that the Azerbaijanis who left Karabakh will be fully involved in the decision-making and governance regarding the future of Nagorno-Karabakh," he added.

He expressed guilt for not stating unequivocally that even the unacceptable scenarios proposed to us were not acceptable to Azerbaijan, and that representatives of the international community sometimes explicitly and sometimes diplomatically conveyed to us that all these options, even if accepted by the Armenian side, had to convince Azerbaijan to accept them.

"I was obliged to present all this in detail to our people; my real guilt is not doing that. Such a formulation of accusation is by no means an attempt to ease the situation; on the contrary, it exacerbates it because by giving in, I might have saved thousands of lives, while by not giving in, I became the author of decisions that led to thousands of casualties," Prime Minister Pashinyan concluded, adding, "That is more than betrayal, that is a mistake."