YEREVAN. – [Ex-President] Robert Kocharyan says that if the prime minister had been a Turkish agent, he would have done everything that was done. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Wednesday stated this at the National Assembly of Armenia while presenting the report on the implementation and results of the government program for 2020, referring to the matter of settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict.

"If Robert Kocharyan were a Turkish agent, if in [19]97-98 Armenia were ruled by Turkish agents, the biggest service they could have provided to Azerbaijan would have been to exclude Karabakh from the negotiation process, guaranteeing that Karabakh is internally considered part of Azerbaijan," Pashinyan stated in particular.

“I am not even saying that when the Kocharyan-[ex-President Serzh] Sargsyan duo came to power in 1998, it considered a betrayal to even discuss the possibility of resolving the Karabakh issue in phases, whereas in 2018, there was a negotiation package on the table, which is entitled as follows: Declaration on the first phase and further steps of the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,’" Pashinyan said.

According to Pashinyan, after coming to power using the Karabakh issue in 1998, the Kocharyan-Sargsyan duo lost the negotiation process within 20 years. "They lost the victory achieved in the first Artsakh war (…). They lost in the field of diplomacy, in the field of army-building (…). They lost in the development of infrastructure and of the state, in general," the Armenian PM added.