Among the primary tools for ensuring security, we have probably forgotten, if not the most important, then at least one of the most important institutions, which later became one of the axes of our security strategy: that tool is legitimacy. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this in his address at the Comprehensive Security & Resilience International Conference – 2025 that kicked off Monday in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan.

“We [i.e. Armenia] realized that if we want to recognize our territorial integrity ourselves in the same way as military-political alliances. If you recognize your territorial integrity in one way while your core security system recognizes it in another way, it means that you are at least losing your territorial integrity between these two perceptions, which practically happened in May 2021, in December 2022.

This is where the most important conversation took place in October 2022 in Prague.

And is Azerbaijan ready to recognize the territorial integrity of Armenia? Because if it turns out that it is not ready, it will change the entire content of the conversation.

First, we had to decide what our territorial integrity is, and we decided to rely on unquestionable legitimacy. We relied on the Alma-Ata Declaration and set a task: we are ready to recognize the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan on the basis of the Alma-Ata Declaration because we ourselves are ready to recognize our territorial integrity on the basis of that declaration,” Pashinyan said.

He added that in Prague, Armenia and Azerbaijan reached a political agreement that they are ready to recognize each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty on the basis of the Alma-Ata Declaration.

“This was the turning point that changed our entire strategy. This was our first attempt to turn legitimacy into a security tool. From that point on, that tool began to work. Its wording is as follows: ‘Based on the Alma-Ata Declaration, the inviolability of Armenia’s 29,743 square-kilometer internationally recognized sovereign territory and the borders encompassing that territory, both internally and externally,’” said the Armenian PM.