The negative prevails in all of our feelings about 2021. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan stated this Wednesday during the National Assembly debates on the execution of the 2021 program of the government of Armenia

He said that as of today, the number of Armenian casualties of the 44-day Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war in the fall of 2020 is 3,825, and that most of their bodies were found or identified and buried in 2021.

"Why did it happen like this? I will answer this question myself. From the beginning I have accepted my guilt and accountability for both the war and the defeat, but I have not accepted and do not accept the accusations leveled against me by the opposition after November 9, 2020, accusing [me] of handing over lands and thus of treason as well," the Armenian PM said.

He noted that in a recent interview he hinted that if they want to attribute an objective accusation to him, he should be accused not of handing over land, but of not handing over land.

"Yes, I want to admit that I may be guilty of it. It is my fault that I did not stand before our society in 2018-2019 and did not voice that all our close and distant friends expect us to hand over the seven known regions to Azerbaijan in this or that configuration, and lower the yardstick we have set for the status of Artsakh.

It is my fault that I did not tell our people that the international community unequivocally recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, expects us to recognize it as well, expects the Azerbaijanis who left Karabakh to be fully involved in the matters of deciding and governing the future of Nagorno-Karabakh.

It is my fault that I did not say clearly and unequivocally that even the proposed scenarios unacceptable to us were not acceptable to Azerbaijan, and the representatives of the international community were sometimes telling us clearly, sometimes diplomatically, that if all this is accepted by the Armenian side, Azerbaijan still needs to be convinced that it accept [as well].

I had to present all this in detail to our people; not doing this is my real fault for.

Such a wording of the accusation is not at all an attempt to alleviate the situation, but on the contrary, I aggravates it even more because by handing over [the aforesaid lands] I might have saved thousands of lives, whereas by not handing over, I in fact became the author of decisions leading to thousands of casualties," said PM Pashinyan. "This is more than a treachery; it's wrong," he added.