Former President Serzh Sargsyan on Thursday brushed aside Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s latest statement blaming Armenia’s former leaders and foreign powers for the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Sargsyan said that Pashinyan admitted having “consciously sacrificed” Karabakh to Azerbaijan in a televised interview last week.
Speaking to Armenian Public Television, Pashinyan claimed that U.S., Russian and French mediators leading the OSCE Minsk Group had predetermined the “dissolution” of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic with their peace plans drawn up prior to his rise to power in 2018. He said virtually none of those plans offered a comprehensive solution to the conflict with Azerbaijan.
Some of the mediating powers for decades used the conflict as a “truncheon hanging over Armenia’s head,” Pashinyan charged amid his government’s unprecedented tensions with Russia.
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“I saw many lies and falsifications in that speech but must single out one important fact: Armenia’s ruler admitted that he sacrificed Karabakh consciously,” Sargsyan told reporters.
“I just didn’t understand what truncheons he is talking about, who had brandished those truncheons over Armenia’s head,” he said. “The [Minsk Group] co-chairs who had issued five statements to the effect that Nagorno-Karabakh’s status must be determined through the expression of [Karabakh residents’] will?”
“Did he mean the country which had provided us with billions of dollars worth of weapons for free or at discounted prices and which he handed over to Azerbaijan?” the ex-president added, referring to Russia.
Most of the Karabakh peace proposals were based on so-called Madrid Principles which the United States, Russia and France originally put forward 2007. This framework agreement envisaged that Karabakh’s predominantly ethnic Armenian population would determine the region’s internationally recognized status in a future referendum.
Pashinyan has repeatedly denounced the Madrid Principles in an effort to absolve himself of blame for the 2020 war in Karabakh won by Azerbaijan. He has said that this peace formula, largely accepted by Sargsyan and his predecessor Robert Kocharyan, essentially recognized Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan and called for Armenia’s “capitulation.”
Armenian opposition leaders and other government critics have shrugged off those claims. They say that Pashinyan made the disastrous war inevitable by rejecting the last version of the Madrid Principles.
In 2021, Sargsyan publicized the secretly recorded audio of a 2019 meeting during which Pashinyan said he opposes that peace plan because it would not immediately formalize Karabakh’s secession from Azerbaijan. Pashinyan said he is ready to “play the fool or look a bit insane” in order to avoid such a settlement.