Today I want to talk about leadership. Recently, in a completely unexpected place, I came across an extremely telling example of this phenomenon. This was stated today, March 23, by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during a live broadcast on his Facebook page.

"Although the context was not about leadership at all, but about a plane crash. I was watching a film on the National Geographic channel called 'Air Crash Investigation,' which told the story of the Munich airport disaster in 1958. The passengers on board were Manchester United footballers flying from Munich to Great Britain. 20 of the 44 passengers were killed.

Eyewitnesses and some passengers recounted the incident, which occurred under very strange circumstances. The plane first accelerated on the runway but failed to take off, turned around and attempted to take off a second time, but again failed. After the second failed attempt, passengers were disembarked, and about an hour and a half to two hours later, another technical fault was announced, which was said to have been fixed. On the third attempt, the plane took off and crashed.

I was struck by one episode, when one of the passengers gave an interview and described how they were invited back on board after disembarking. He said: 'I kept thinking: what are they doing, where are they taking us, how could this technical problem have been fixed in such a short time?' He says he thought: 'This is impossible, this has to be stopped, this has to be stopped.' This eyewitness said: 'It seems to me that at that moment everyone was thinking exactly that, everyone was thinking the same thing.' And the journalist asks him: 'If you thought that, why didn't you speak up?' And the passenger gives a quite predictable answer: 'Well, I thought they would say he got scared, he's a coward, his nerves gave out, he's psychologically weak, he has no willpower,' and so on.

Reflecting on this episode, I came to the following conclusion: the fact that everyone was probably thinking the same thing, but kept moving forward, and no one spoke up — this silence was the result of an absence of leadership. And if one of them had spoken up, looked the truth in the eye, acknowledged that reality and the conclusions that followed from it, and made a proposal before boarding the plane, naturally they would have received support and taken responsibility — although, most likely, the first reaction of the other 43 passengers would have been that this person who spoke up was a coward lacking willpower.

After watching this film and reflecting further on the situation and leadership, I came to the conviction that leadership, above all, consists of changing predetermined events, stepping out of a predetermined chain of events or a predetermined path, and having the strength, will and determination to do so.

Of course, I am sure that many of you will guess what I mean. I mean that we, yes, in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, demonstrated the leadership responsibilities entrusted to us by our people, and led our country away from a predetermined catastrophic path.

First, we stopped and led our country out, including through the resolve and will not to continue the Karabakh movement, and we brought our country to a peaceful haven.

That is why we say that now is the most right and appropriate moment for the people to respond, because the people must stand up in defense of peace, and the former leadership must be replaced by people's leadership, which must delegate leadership to that team, that ruling majority, which at the decisive moment was able to take the lead and act outside the framework of predetermined logic, and was able to bring the country to a peaceful resolution, as was previously promised."