Today it is necessary to have an unemotional and cool conversation. Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan mentioned this during his speech at the National Assembly.
"It is very important to clarify the context of what is happening. Why is all this happening? Let us fix that all the claims that the Armenian armed forces resorted to some kind of provocations, and Azerbaijan's actions were in response to the actions of the Armenian armed forces, are completely untrue. In recent days, I think you have noticed that the Azerbaijani side was constantly spreading information in the genre of information war, allegedly regarding the attacks undertaken by the Armenian Armed Forces, the Ministry of Defense of Armenia, of course, denied all that, because it had nothing to do with reality.
What is happening and why is it happening?
The first, of course, is related to the Karabakh issue negotiation process. You all remember that in March 2022, Azerbaijan presented 5 recommendations regarding the peace treaty and proposed to sign a peace treaty based on that. Our response to this was that there is nothing unacceptable to us in those proposals, but we believe that those points should be filled in, and on that filled basis, we are ready to negotiate and sign a peace treaty.
During this time, it seemed that there was an understanding on the topic, but recently, and in particular during the last meeting in Brussels, it became clear that, nevertheless, Azerbaijan refuses to conduct peace negotiations based on the principles we presented,” said Pashinyan.
Pashinyan reminded that there were several points in those principles. One of them was related to the security, rights and status of the Nagorno-Karabakh people.
“Azerbaijan's position, which was expressed in the negotiation process, is as follows: they said that they do not want to discuss the Karabakh issue with Armenia, because their position is that the Karabakh issue is resolved, or at least it is an internal issue of Azerbaijan, and they do not want to discuss this issue with Armenia.
The story doesn't end there. We have said before and we say that one of the principles proposed by Azerbaijan, which refers to the mutual recognition of territorial integrity, is acceptable to us. Everything does not end here, as further clarifications are needed.
And, for example, what do we mean by territorial integrity? For example, does Azerbaijan mean the territories occupied by Azerbaijan either as a result of the events of May 12, 2021 or during the first Karabakh war? This issue, according to our impressions and discussions, does not get a definite response from Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan expects Armenia to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, which logically follows from my emphasis made a while ago,” said Pashinyan.
According to Pashinyan, a question arises. Will Azerbaijan not have any territorial claims against Armenia after these two problems are solved?
“In the context of the conversation and the recording of political positions, it sounds that, yes, Azerbaijan has no territorial claims against Armenia. But when there is a conversation about, for example, the process of demarcation and delimitation, it becomes obvious that Azerbaijan is going to raise certain problems in the context of the processes of demarcation and delimitation, with its wording and definition, regarding some territories as if handed over to Armenia in an illegal way. They mention the names of those areas in their public speeches, they talk about those areas, although we must fix that when interviews or announcements with such content are made, they sometimes start from Nrnadzor, continue with Zangezur or Syunik province, and end in the capital of Armenia - Yerevan,” said Armenia’s Prime Minister.
