Pashinian, who came to power in 2018 after mass street protests that ousted Sarkisian, posted a video on Facebook in which he said that “to prevent the 44-day war, one thing was necessary — we had to align the legitimacy of our vision for resolving the Karabakh issue with the international legitimacy of that resolution.”
According to the prime minister, such alignment could not be achieved because “since the early 1990s, the legitimacy of our understanding of the Karabakh settlement and that of the international community had diverged, creating a gap between the two.” He argued that bridging this gap would have required Armenia to acknowledge that “Karabakh must be within Azerbaijan,” which, he said, was “practically impossible” at that time.
“There was no other option,” Pashinian said. “If anyone believes we could have done that in 2018 or 2019, then yes, it was my mistake that I did not do so.”
The 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war over Nagorno-Karabakh, in which nearly 7,000 soldiers were killed on both sides, ended largely on Baku’s terms under a Moscow-brokered cease-fire on November 9, 2020. Azerbaijan regained much of the territory around Nagorno-Karabakh as well as parts of the mostly Armenian-populated region itself. Baku completed its seizure of the breakaway region in September 2023, forcing more than 100,000 Armenians — the entire local population — to flee to Armenia.
Pashinian’s comments came after Sarkisian said in a YouTube podcast that the 44-day war began due to “avoidance and general abandonment of the negotiation process” and the introduction of what he described as “some incomprehensible version” by negotiators that halted the talks.
Sarkisian said certain actions by the Armenian side allowed Azerbaijan to justify launching the war and claimed that the intelligence services of Azerbaijan and Turkey were aware of declining combat readiness within Armenia’s armed forces.
The former president cited three main reasons for the outbreak of hostilities, emphasizing that the war was “not inevitable.” He said that before 2018, when Pashinian came to power, war was still not regarded as a certain eventuality, but that in the second half of 2018 and in 2019 he began to see “problems” in the army and by 2020 was convinced that “military actions were in the offing.”
Sarkisian and two other former Armenian presidents, Robert Kocharian and Levon Ter-Petrosian, have rejected Pashinian’s repeated invitations to participate in a live debate with him on the Nagorno-Karabakh negotiations. Instead, they urged him to publish all documents related to the internationally mediated peace process, claiming that Pashinian rejected a peace plan before the 2020 war that would have placed Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh in a much better position if it had been accepted. They also accuse him of turning down a Russian offer to stop the 2020 war earlier, when Armenian forces were in stronger positions.
Pashinian has rejected all accusations. He said that key documents from the negotiation history will be published by the end of the year.