Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has issued a statement on August 23 on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence of Armenia.
Below is the statement released by his office.
"Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,
On August 23, 1990, the Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR adopted the Declaration of Independence of Armenia.
This document marked the beginning of the process of establishing our independent statehood, the Republic of Armenia. The Declaration, in essence, expressed the collective mood of the political and intellectual elite of Armenia at the time of its adoption, bore the stamp of the Karabakh movement that had begun just two years earlier and was reaching its peak, and was to predetermine the key features of the newly formed independent Republic of Armenia.
And so it happened, because the key ideological provisions of the Declaration were conflict-oriented and expressed the model of our collective patriotism that had been gradually but consistently instilled in us by the Soviet Union since the 1950s, in the environment of the establishment of the Iron Curtain and the start of the Cold War.
This model of patriotism that the Soviet Union had formed for us, Armenians, expressed the southwestern direction of the ambitions of the USSR, a state that had won the Second World War and entered into conflict with the North Atlantic Alliance. This model, on the other hand, was intended to ensure the export of patriotic perceptions existing in the Armenian SSR from the territory of the republic, in order to prevent its local expression.
This ideology has been instilled for decades through books, films, theater performances, and it is our socio-psychology formed in this way that led to the Karabakh movement. We, all of us, were the bearers of that socio-psychology, that socio-psychology formed by the USSR was passed on to the generations formed in the Republic of Armenia in the 90s, and the deep and subconscious goal of that socio-psychology was the strategic impossibility of the existence of an independent state of Armenia, because a country with a conflict context all around cannot build real independence.
Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,
A complete and comprehensive analysis of the information and reality available to me in the position of Prime Minister has brought me to the unshakable conviction that we should not continue the Karabakh movement, as it means the abolition of the independence of the Republic of Armenia. Today I also want to answer a question that is perhaps the most important for understanding the history of the last 7 years.
Finally, why did the Republic of Armenia, our Government, and I myself not make concessions by September 2020, which was the only theoretical opportunity to avoid the 44-day war? The key reason for this was that as a result of those concessions, all the threats and dependencies we had would have further increased, would have increased disproportionately, leading to the loss of Armenia’s independence and statehood.
We adopted a strategy to preserve Armenia's independence and make that independence a reality, and the expression of that strategy is the ideology of the Real Armenia, under which peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan became possible, under which real dialogue with Turkey became possible, under which our relations with Georgia and the Islamic Republic of Iran should deepen, under which we become a real and interesting partner for the world.
Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,
Our state, the Republic of Armenia, one of the key features of which is its internationally recognized sovereign territory of 29 thousand 743 square kilometers, is the most important value that we have and that we have had for the past more than 500 years. And we must be guided by the interests of our state, and our state and its interests must be the basis and axis of our patriotism, for the love of the creative people living in it, all of you.
We are going this way and, having passed through hellish trials on this way, we have reached an incredible milestone. The Republic of Armenia is today more independent than ever, more sovereign than ever, more a state than ever, more prosperous than ever, more promising than ever, because it is peaceful. Peace has been established and it must become the subject of daily care and concern, it must become institutional.
August 2025 marked the beginning of a peaceful and prosperous life for the Republic of Armenia.
I congratulate all of us on this occasion.
Glory to the martyrs and long live the Republic of Armenia."
