Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said, “The Artsakh (Karabakh) movement was a fatal mistake for us,” at a campaign event in Kornidzor on Friday, vowing to “stop the Karabakh movement” and arguing that the contested territories “were never ours for us to lose them.”
Today marks the official opening of the campaign period ahead of Armenia’s June 7 parliamentary elections, where Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party faces Robert Kocharyan’s Armenia Alliance and Samvel Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia bloc.
Pashinyan went further than past statements, declaring that his government had moved to formally end the movement itself.
“Factors connected to the Karabakh movement were used for years to prevent the progress of our state. We made a very important conclusion. We made a very difficult decision, and that decision is to stop the Karabakh movement,” he said.
Addressing criticism that his government “lost territories,” Pashinyan argued that such accusations were misleading because those territories “were never ours for us to lose them.”
“We convinced ourselves that they were ours. Those territories not only did not belong to us, but they were also used to weaken, weaken and weaken our sense of ownership and belonging regarding our internationally recognized territories,” Pashinyan said.
He added that the scenario facing Armenia in 2018 envisioned the country eventually ceasing to exist as a sovereign state and, at best, becoming a “banana republic” that would need permission from outside powers even to “breathe in and out.”
“We have gone through a very difficult path and made difficult realizations. The hardest of them was understanding that our state, from the very first day of its creation in 1991, had been trapped,” Pashinyan said. “Today, we have removed our state from that trap and placed it on a completely different path — the path of development.”
Pashinyan said his government quickly realized after coming to power in 2018 that Armenia had fallen into a geopolitical “trap,” and that its mission was to pull the country out of it.
“At the cost of our casualties and sacrifices, we have pulled Armenia out of that trap, and this is the most important thing,” he said. “Those who say the sacrifices were in vain do not understand this — that Armenia’s statehood was saved from the trap.”
Pashinyan said Armenia had never truly experienced peace prior to 2020, citing recurring casualties and injuries along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border every year.
“It is a lie that there was peace before 2020,” he stated. “Every year we had killed and wounded soldiers on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border. We never had peace.”
The prime minister said Armenians had been misled into believing the Artsakh issue could be resolved the way it had been framed by Armenian leaders and media for decades.
“We deceived ourselves into believing that we could solve the Artsakh issue the way we were told on television. That was the biggest lie and deception,” he said.
Pashinyan said the framework for resolving the Artsakh issue had effectively been determined at the 1996 Lisbon Summit, arguing that the years that followed were merely a delay of a larger existential threat facing Armenia.
“This entire delay and postponement was aimed at one thing: resolving the ‘Armenia issue’ — meaning the elimination of Armenian statehood,” he stated.
Pashinyan also argued that Armenians had been falsely told the country’s economic difficulties were caused by support for Artsakh.
He claimed pensions and salaries in Artsakh had at times been higher than those in Armenia due to financial assistance from Yerevan.
“We were told that we lived badly because of Artsakh, but that was also a lie,” he said. “Pensions and salaries in Artsakh were higher at Armenia’s expense, and those who forget this are ungrateful.”
The remarks are Pashinyan’s sharpest disavowal to date of the cause that defined three decades of post-Soviet Armenian politics. Kornidzor is the Syunik border town through which more than 100,000 Armenians fled their homes during Azerbaijan’s September 2023 offensive and ethnic cleansing of Artsakh.
