VIDEO: You Propose a Path That Has Been Tested and Leads to Disaster, Says Deputy Speaker of Parliament

We say that under the current circumstances, the best way to guarantee, strengthen, and ensure the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Armenia is to stand within our legitimate borders. We must rely on international law, our legitimacy, and our internationally recognized borders, and we must defend our territorial integrity and sovereignty by regulating relations with our neighbors. This means creating a situation where there is no aggression around us, depriving aggressive parties of the desire or intent to resort to aggression, creating a situation where engaging in such aggression does not serve their interests or is impossible, using the instruments provided by international law and, in general, the toolset of international relations. This was stated by the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly Ruben Rubinyan in response to the opposition's criticisms of the ruling party's policies.

“You are coming from a zero-sum game logic, which means you are essentially saying (perhaps not directly, but this is how I perceive what you are saying) that international law, borders, are not fundamentally important. What matters is the following: either they must destroy us, or we must destroy them. This is where we need to start, and therefore, we should not take any action outside of this, because everything else is meaningless.

I must be honest and say that it is not that your assertion is always wrong, because history has seen cases (both in Armenia’s and other peoples’ and countries’ cases) where your assertion was correct. But to understand whether your assertion is applicable to Armenia's current situation, we need to turn to mathematics; we must calculate whether the strategy you mentioned is realistic for our case or not. Unfortunately or fortunately, we have tested your assertion in real life over the past 30 years, because, in essence, our last 30 years have been about whether we can maintain or not,” he said.

According to Rubinyan, the Armenian side did not take action towards solutions and ended up with the worst possible outcome, namely, the depopulation of Artsakh, thinking that where the Armenian soldier can stand, that is our border, while we have learned from our own experience that this leads to the worst possible solution.

“I suggest we continue the discussion, because this is the crux of the vision we and you propose. You propose a path that has been tested and leads to disaster; we propose a path that, by the way, has not even been tested yet, meaning we want to test for the first time an alternative to the path that obviously leads to disaster,” he said.

Details in the video.