On September 13, Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan came to the Parliament to present the situation and answer the deputies’ questions. Pashinyan presented the demands that Azerbaijan presented at the last meeting in Brussels, saying that it will not sign a peace treaty, it does not accept the proposals of the Armenian side, and it wants everything from Narnadzor to Yerevan.
“With these actions, Azerbaijan wants to defeat the peace agenda. Peace is the environment that can ensure the security of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh,” Pashinyan said in his speech, adding that everyone wants peace, but the problem is that when we say peace, people imagine different things. As for what they should do in the current situation, Pashinyan said that by all possible means, Armenia should preserve its sovereignty, territorial integrity, strive for peace and reform the army and armed forces as quickly as possible. Civil Contract faction deputy Sergey Bagratyan asked: we must protect our sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity, do we have the right to arm ourselves with defensive weapons?
Pashinyan answered, “It is clear that you will not do anything by will, but you will not do anything without will either. We consider the issue of acquiring weapons and ammunition as a whole, but the issue consists of 4 components. The first is financial, the second is political, the third is technical, and the fourth is transportation. Whenever we talk about the acquisition of weapons and ammunition, we must imagine that it consists of these 4 components. We can record that Armenia today has all the financial possibilities to acquire the defense weapons and ammunition it needs. The second is the political component. Naturally, not all countries are ready to sell arms to Armenia, but there are countries that are ready.
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There are countries that are not ready for the fact that Armenia will buy weapons from a country that is ready to sell them weapons. It may seem that they are not ready, and that’s their business. But this lack of preparedness has consequences, including security. Weapons are usually purchased to manage a security threat, but there are situations where the purchase of weapons is related to new security threats. The next problem is technical, there are countries that want and are ready to sell weapons to Armenia, but they do not have the weapons we need for objective and subjective reasons, for example, with the logic that they have arranged their production volumes in the coming years in such a way that their position in the market in order not to lose, they must ensure the contractual obligations. The next problem is transport. Armenia has no access to the sea. In most cases, the transportation problem does not differ in its complexity from the previous components. Does Armenia currently have the financial means to buy weapons to solve the problem of significantly increasing its defense capability? We have the necessary means.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
