The rhetoric about “Western Azerbaijan” does not fit into the peace agenda, and we consider the so-called “Western Azerbaijan” as a direct threat to the territorial integrity of Armenia. Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party MP candidate, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan on Tuesday stated this during a parliamentary election debate on Public Television.

“There are still unresolved issues between the countries,” Mirzoyan noted.

The Armenian FM once again dismissed the allegations about the preparations for settling 300 thousand Azerbaijanis in Armenia. According to him, international organizations have not recognized the Azerbaijanis who left Soviet Armenia in the last years of the USSR’s existence as refugees.

“When they raise the issue of the return of Armenians to Karabakh, they pave the way for a mirror connection to emerge from the opposite side,” Mirzoyan said.

He assured that the incumbent Armenian authorities will not revise the national symbols if re-elected. “Ararat is a mountain that has played and plays a very important symbolic role in the formation of our consciousness, but it is not in our territory,” Mirzoyan added.

He reiterated that in 2019, there were no new proposals from the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs in terms of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, and options were proposed with amendments to the proposals of 2016-2017, which were followed by a number of meetings and discussions.

“Earlier, the third President of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, had stated that the negotiations were at a deadlock, and the ways to resolve the issue through negotiations had been exhausted,” Mirzoyan added.

He noted that there were no contradictions between his statements from the UN rostrum during the Armenian ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan’s statements.