During a press briefing, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan once again reaffirmed Azerbaijan’s alleged “right” to the so-called enclaves. This, of course, is nothing new. Pashinyan publicly acknowledged that claim long ago. What is new, however, is that he now explicitly links the issue to the territories he himself considers occupied by Azerbaijan—both those seized during the two-day fighting in the Jermuk direction and those taken without a single shot being fired in May 2021.
Pashinyan has consistently described those territories as occupied. His disagreement with the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) over this issue led him to freeze Armenia’s relations with the bloc. Yet now he argues that Armenia, too, controls Azerbaijani territory and asks: if Armenia refuses to return those areas, on what grounds can it demand the return of the territories occupied by Azerbaijan?
In other words, Pashinyan is effectively saying: “The CSTO was right, and I was wrong.” After all, this is precisely what the CSTO maintained—that the absence of delimitation and demarcation created uncertainty over border disputes. Pashinyan is now de facto acknowledging that the issue is, indeed, a border dispute to be resolved through territorial exchange.
One may, of course, set aside the fact that this effectively exposes the entire CSTO narrative as a major information bubble—one that was inflated and exploited for several years under the banner of defending Armenia’s sovereignty, yielding considerable domestic propaganda dividends.
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There is, however, a far more substantive issue at stake. Handing over the so-called enclaves to Azerbaijan would significantly expand Baku’s ability to establish and deepen its military-political and demographic dominance over Armenia. Moreover, the military aggression in the Jermuk direction also served to advance that objective.
Most alarming, however, is the formula Pashinyan is now articulating. By de facto recognizing the occupation of Armenian territory as a consequence of war, he is simultaneously treating that very occupation as a legitimate instrument for advancing Azerbaijan’s claims against Armenia.
Such a position is arguably unprecedented in the history of international relations: a state declares that parts of its territory have been occupied, and then proceeds to use that occupation itself to justify the occupying state’s additional claims against it.
Hakob BADALYAN
