Pashinyan denies ex-president's allegations about changed content of Karabakh talks
YEREVAN, May 3. /ARKA/. Armenia's acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan denied today ex-president Serzh Sargsyan's allegations made in a recent interview that the content of the negotiations on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict changed in 2018 after Pashinyan came to power as a result of the so-called 'velvet revolution.'
An independent MP Tigran Urikhanyan referring to this interview asked Pashinyan to comment on Sargsyan's allegations.
"After you came to power, the negotiation process, according to Serzh Sargsyan, changed several times to become incomprehensible, and what happened later was its consequent," he said.
"Serzh Sargsyan is trying to show that the logic of the negotiations changed after 2018. In fact, it had happened in 2015 and 2016. And Sargsyan himself reported this, saying earlier that the April war in 2016 meant one thing - Azerbaijan refused the peaceful settlement of the conflict within the framework of the Madrid principles," Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan said also that in future, when certain documents related to the negotiation process are revealed, it will emerge that Sargsyan had written a letter to the mediators, expressing certain concern about the number of Azerbaijanis who would be considered residents of Nagorno-Karabakh after the referendum on the definition of its status, proposed by the Madrid Principles.
"In order for an Azerbaijani to be a resident of Nagorno-Karabakh and participate in the referendum, they must live in Nagorno-Karabakh. The question is: where the Azeri residents of Nagorno-Karabakh were supposed to live?" asked Pashinyan.
"If Serzh Sargsyan decided that he should make discoveries, let him be kind enough to tell people about the events that happened in autumn 2015 and winter 2016, after which there was the spring 2016 war," Pashinyan said.
On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijani armed forces, backed by Turkey and foreign mercenaries and terrorists, attacked Nagorno-Karabakh along the entire front line using rocket and artillery weapons, heavy armored vehicles, military aircraft and prohibited types of weapons such as cluster bombs and phosphorus weapons.
After 44 days of the war, on November 9, the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a statement on the cessation of all hostilities. According to the document, the parties stopped at where they were at that time. The town of Shushi, the districts of Agdam, Kelbajar and Lachin were handed over to Azerbaijan, with the exception of a 5-kilometer corridor connecting Karabakh with Armenia.
A Russian peacekeeping contingent was deployed along the contact line in Karabakh and along the Lachin corridor. -0-
