I advise Pashinyan not to talk about the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict because whatever he says is to the detriment of the Armenian side. This is what ex-MP Ruben Hakobyan said during a discussion on “Karabakh on the Threshold of Changes: External and Internal Security” today.

According to him, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia always has to justify the contradicting statements that Pashinyan makes. “This concerns both the statement that “Karabakh is Armenia, period” and the statement that there haven’t been any talks, even though the recent Joint Statement by the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan and the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group shows that there have been agreements, meaning there have also been talks. The task of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also becoming complicated since Pashinyan has offered a formula according to which the decision has to satisfy three sides, but hasn’t offered mechanisms, and the Azerbaijanis are trying to take advantage of this,” he stated.

Hakobyan focused on the verbal agreements in Dushanbe where, for the first time in the history of Armenia, the Azerbaijanis, in essence, expressed willingness to support the Armenian authorities’ aspiration to strengthen their positions within the country, and this was expressed through the reduction of tension on the border. “The meeting in Davos caused tremendous harm to the achievements that Armenia had made in Vienna, Saint Petersburg and Geneva when, in essence, the border of Karabakh was recorded at the international level and the aggressor had been detected. After the new authorities came to power in Armenia, there were no such formulations, and in March 2019, Yerevan asked for time to become familiar with the process, providing Baku with the opportunity to advance its agenda,” the ex-MP stressed.