In separate interviews over the weekend, former Presidents Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian again accused Pashinian of rejecting a viable peace plan and derailing internationally mediated talks with Azerbaijan. They claimed this was one of the major factors that led to the 2020 war, in which the Armenian side suffered a defeat.
The two former leaders also alleged that, after coming to power through mass street protests in 2018, Pashinian mishandled army affairs and relations with Armenia’s allies, notably Russia. Both said the 44-day war could have been stopped earlier, which, they argued, would have put Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia in a much better position vis-à-vis Azerbaijan.
In a Facebook post on November 10, Pashinian said the remarks by Kocharian and Sarkisian “once again confirm that the Karabakh issue was used by certain forces as a rope to tie the Republic of Armenia to the ‘nearest tree.’”
“The rights of peoples, historical justice, and similar concepts were merely a smokescreen for the real objective,” he wrote.
According to the prime minister, all the proposals presented as efforts to “stop the war” were in fact aimed at tightening the leash. “The ultimate goal of this process of tightening the leash was to end Armenian statehood,” he said. “In that scenario, the Karabakh conflict was meant to conclude only with the loss of Armenia’s statehood. Thanks to the sacrifice of our martyrs and the historical intuition of our people in Armenia and Karabakh, the Republic of Armenia managed to escape that scenario.”
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.
Kocharian, Sarkisian, and the other former Armenian president, Levon Ter-Petrosian, have effectively rejected Pashinian’s repeated invitations to take part 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 accused Pashinian of turning down a Russian offer to halt the 2020 war earlier, which they said would have left Armenian forces in stronger positions and spared thousands of lives.
Pashinian has rejected all the accusations. In his most recent Facebook post, the prime minister said the publication of the documents related to the negotiation process will make his arguments “more evident.”