The West or Russia never had a monopoly on dealing with the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this in an interview to the Public Television Company of Armenia, referring to the view that Russia perceives that Armenia “went” to the West, tried to take the solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue from the “hands” of Russia, and give solutions on the platform of Russia’s enemy.

"Another issue is that in particular, from February 2022, a crisis arose in the co-chairmanship of the Minsk Group for a simple reason, when the former partners said that ‘we are not going to communicate with each other, not because of Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh or Azerbaijan, but because of Ukraine.’ That is, we have not done anything new, because, like the Nagorno-Karabakh issue before, we have discussed Armenia-Azerbaijan relations both in Russia and in the West. It’s another thing that they used to communicate with each other, but now they don't. Now they think that we should communicate less with the other side; but this is a wrong approach from the point of view of Armenia's interests. We cannot enter that ‘zone’ and say ‘we are talking with you; we are not talking with you.’ Our relations with them have not changed," said Pashinyan.

According to him, Armenia and Azerbaijan have declared that they recognize each other's territorial integrity, in the territory of 29,800 square kilometers of Armenia and 86,600 square kilometers of Azerbaijan, respectively.

"I was asked whether Nagorno-Karabakh is included in the 86,600 square kilometers, I said yes," he added.

And asked whether that was a wrong statement after which Azerbaijan hardened its position and rhetoric and closed the Lachin corridor, Pashinyan responded: "With that statement, Armenia tried to record the agreement on the architecture of the situation and the resolution of the crisis, which we agreed with Azerbaijan in Brussels. We [i.e. Armenia] show that we are committed to that agreement. Azerbaijan does not always show loyalty to agreements. Even when we had not made that statement, Azerbaijan broke the line of contact in Parukh [village of Nagorno-Karabakh], before that it broke the line of contact in Khtsaberd [village of Nagorno-Karabakh], and before that there was the war of September 13. Did we make the wrong statements before that? The problem here is the following that Azerbaijan has demonstrated its approach to resolving issues by force, and we are trying to somehow manage, with political statements, the force scenarios that Azerbaijan constantly puts on the table. We want to fit into such formulations that the legitimacy of Armenia's positions is invulnerable."