YEREVAN. – In the Armenian government’s 2018 program, it was pledged that Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) shall become a negotiating party; but a year later, there is no progress in the promised steps.

Armen Ashotyan, vice-chairman of the former ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), said about the aforementioned at a press conference on Monday.

In Ashotyan’s conviction, a second problem has come about over the course of this one year, with respect to resolving the Karabakh conflict.

“During the rule of the incumbent [Armenian] powers, no official statement of the [OSCE Minsk Group] co-chairs reflects on the need for fulfillment of the Vienna, Saint Petersburg, and Geneva agreements,” he explained. “And those obligations were Azerbaijan’s diplomatic defeat after the [four-day] April [2016] war.”

The RPA senior official stressed that not including the fulfillment of these obligations in official statements “means contributing to absolving Azerbaijan from the accountability for the April war.”

Armen Ashotyan argued that if the incumbent Armenian government is keeping away from placing the emphasis on these obligations and is succumbing to “elevator diplomacy, then it should also be expected that this elevator diplomacy will have its descent.”