If you want to destroy a state, you just have to destroy the trust toward the state; everything has been done in Armenia to have this. The second president of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan, said this in an interview with three media outlets on Wednesday, when asked how to restore trust in the state, taking into account the situation that the state, the government was in the role of the liar.

"In my impression, a criminal punishment should be established by law against an official who lies—and a very severe punishment. And you know who the main liar in our country is [i.e., PM Nikol Pashinyan]. This has become a political culture [in Armenia]," he noted.

Kocharyan added that the biggest danger is that lying has become so commonplace among Armenian officials that it is not even perceived as an extraordinary case. "How are we going to build a country on these lies?," he asked.

According to the second president, the Armenian government that told lies about the recent 44-day Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war is still in power, and that surprises everyone.

To the journalist's question that when the de facto head of state declares from the tribune of the National Assembly that Shushi of Artsakh is an Azerbaijani city and the occupied territories are called “Azerbaijani territories,” is it possible to generate political processes in such an atmosphere and save the state from destruction, Kocharyan suggested that PM Pashinyan speak about Yerevan on the principle of Shushi. "I will suggest looking at the statistics as to what national proportion the population of Yerevan had in 1913-14. See how many Armenians, how many Caucasian Tatars there were. I would suggest just publish it, and let the prime minister talk about Yerevan on the same principle as Shushi if you only assess the population at that moment. In Shushi, that 90 percent [Azerbaijani population] was the result of the 1920 massacre there. So you accept that you are taking over that city, that territory, killing those people, changing the demographic picture," he said.