In a furious diatribe, Pashinian lashed out at Levon Ter-Petrosian, Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian for spurning a televised debate with him on the issue and continuing to lambaste him through their political allies instead.
“If there is nothing to debate, sit down and shut up,” he said on the parliament floor. “If you are ready to debate, let's talk. I say I will not debate with you, I will throw you against the wall and the remains of your political corpses will be taken out from there. It concerns all three of you. Stop playing with my nerves. I will trample you underfoot, not debate with you.”
“Either you hunker down, shut up and don't talk about that topic, or we go to a live debate,” he warned. “There is no other option.”
Pashinian challenged Ter-Petrosian, Sarkisian and Kocharian to the debate in December after they unanimously dismissed his claims that all peace plans jointly drafted by U.S., Russian and French mediators and considered by Armenia’s former governments were about “returning Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.” The ex-presidents shrugged off the offer, saying that Pashinian is blatantly lying to try to absolve himself of blame for the 2020 war in Karabakh and Azerbaijan’s subsequent takeover of the Armenian-populated region.
Ter-Petrosian also challenged him to publicize those peace plans. Pashinian claimed in January that he is ready to do that but that his administration has still not managed to find those documents.
Ter-Petrosian’s spokesman, Arman Musinian, hit back at Pashinian’s latest rant later on Wednesday.
“He will bite, cry, kick, scream and threaten to complain to higher authorities, do the unimaginable and the unimaginable,” Musinian said in a Facebook post. “But he will never publish the official plans of the Minsk Group for the Karabakh settlement and Armenia's official responses, including the 2019 plan rejected by him.”
Hayk Mamijanian, a senior member of the opposition Republican Party led by Sarkisian, also scoffed at Pashinian’s “hysteria.”
“I will respond with a sentence that Serzh Sarkisian said on another occasion: ‘I don’t deal with sick people,’” wrote Mamijanian.
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 draft framework agreement, repeatedly modified in the following decade, upheld the Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination while calling for their withdrawal from Azerbaijani districts around Karabakh occupied in the early 1990s. Karabakh’s internationally recognized status would be determined through a future referendum.
Pashinian has repeatedly criticized the Madrid Principles since the 2020 war in Karabakh. In particular, he claimed in 2021 that the mediating powers sought a “surrender of lands” to Azerbaijan and offered the Armenian side nothing in return. A senior Russian diplomat, Igor Popov, bluntly denied that in written comments posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website.
Popov said Yerevan and Baku intensively negotiated on the proposed peace formula until Pashinian’s government “came up with new approaches” in 2018. He argued that under the 2019 peace plan, Karabakh would have an internationally recognized interim status and retain control of two of the seven surrounding Azerbaijani districts pending the future referendum on its status.
