Russian President Vladimir Putin does not agree with the statement that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan purposefully handed over Karabakh to Azerbaijan. He stated this in response to a corresponding statement by Margarita Simonyan, editor of the Rossiya Segodnya media group and RT television channel, during the Valdai Discussion Club.

“I cannot agree with you that Prime Minister Pashinyan was brought to power by someone in order to hand over Karabakh. Still, it was the choice of the Armenian people. Yes, you can have different attitudes towards the electoral processes, but this is a fact, so I disagree with you here.

The second thing is that he sought to surrender Karabakh, I do not agree on this either. I communicated closely with him during this conflict in 2020, and before, of course. Let's remember that when he came to power, he said that Karabakh is part of Armenia. No one had ever said this before. True, then his position changed radically... Why? This is no longer a question for me...

And during the conflict of 2020, I communicated with him, and in my opinion, he sincerely sought to maintain the situation and preserve it. Now I’m not talking about whether the decisions were right or wrong. It's none of my business to make judgements on this. But I consider it unfair to say that he purposefully handed over Karabakh,” he noted.