In an interview with ArmNews TV, third President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan disclosed the way his well-known statement “Nikol was right, I was wrong” was supposed to be written in the next-to-last edited version of his statement in 2018.

Sargsyan read this part of the resignation during the interview. It reads as follows: “Nikol Pashinyan was right when he said that he must come to power at any price, I repeat, at any price. I was wrong, thinking that the life of every citizen of Armenia is precious for him.” “I simplified all these sentences, taking into consideration the fact that this could have sparked more tension. I went to meet with Nikol Pashinyan at Armenia Marriott. Most of my colleagues would tell me to not go to meet with him, but I needed to be convinced that there is a red line that this man won’t cross. In a short amount of time, I became convinced that there is a red line and that he is ready to go until the end, and the end seemed very bad to me,” Sargsyan said.

Sargsyan recalled that Nikol Pashinyan was detained on April 22, 2018. “I can assume you are going to ask why he was detained and then released. During the event in the Public Radio of Armenia, there was a small group of people, but on April 22, 2018, there were already quite a lot of people on the streets, and they had crossed the red lines. This is why I didn’t go against the decision of law-enforcement authorities. I was thinking about resigning. I thought that if the law-enforcement authorities’ decision was right and if there would be tranquility after the detention, they should detain him. In any case, I was already thinking about my resignation on the evening of April 21 and on the morning on April 22 since there were reasons for my resignation,” he said.