I’m not surprised that people blame me for giving up power. What should they do, blame themselves? This is what third President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan stated in an interview with ArmNews TV.

“They would have blamed themselves for shutting down streets. This doesn’t mean that I don’t blame myself. Indeed, I couldn’t have imagined that this would be the consequence. Of course, I knew very well that this was an anti-Karabakh movement. I knew that they had tried to make people believe that Armenia isn’t developing and that corruption has reached a high level in Armenia, etc. However, I couldn’t predict such a disaster. I knew that there might be problems. I knew that if the main negotiators during the Nagorno-Karabakh talks change, the solution to the Karabakh issue would go in another direction. There was a big chance,” Sargsyan said.

When told that Nikol Pashinyan could have been detained after the seizure of the Public Radio of Armenia in 2018 and asked why he wasn’t detained, Sargsyan said even though it was a crime, he thought the crime was committed by a small group of people and the movement wouldn’t gain momentum. He added that if a decision was taken to use force, the government would definitely use it. “The problem could have been solved with force, but if we tried to use force on April 19 and after that, I think the consequences would be dire. I simply resigned so that those people could build the country of their dreams. I couldn’t imagine that they were dreaming of something else or they would be so incompetent. I couldn’t imagine such consequences,” he said.