Pashinyan’s statement that the situation on the border has never been as calm as it is now, is manipulative. This is what Vice-President of the Republican Party of Armenia Armen Ashotyan said during a live broadcast on Facebook today.

“Yes, there was tension and escalation during the Four-Day Artsakh War in April 2016, but after the war, Azerbaijan wasn’t taking aggressive actions for a long time. The adversary remained suppressed for a long time after the war in April 2016, and it is dishonest to ascribe this to you or your talks with President of Azerbaijan in an elevator in Dushanbe, especially since there has been tension recently,” he said.

Ashotyan says he doesn’t understand what the Armenian government’s position on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is.

“You don’t use any other word besides ‘status’ and ‘security’. You don’t talk about the right of the people of Artsakh to self-determination. Your foreign minister and representatives of parliamentary diplomacy prefer to utter long sentences than use the term ‘right to self-determination’. What’s the problem? What is on the negotiating table and what are the approaches of the Armenian government? What do you mean when you say ‘pan-national referendum’? If this is populism, then it is very dangerous. You destroyed all that was obtained during the negotiations of the past and haven’t created anything, and now you say there is dynamics in the negotiations. Even if there are dynamics, they are negative,” Ashotyan said.

Yesterday Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan declared live on Facebook that no matter how strange it may sound, there are positive dynamics in the process of negotiations over settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.