YEREVAN. – If we were driven by a mania for maintaining power, we would not have proposed holding snap parliamentary elections back in December 2020. 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.

Also, the PM responded to this question of Anna Kostanyan, a member of the opposition Bright Armenia faction in parliament: "If you claim that you did not make mistakes in the [Karabakh] negotiation process, why did First President Levon Ter-Petrosyan declare that you are a nation-destroying plague?"

In response, Pashinyan said: "The First President has his own idea about the Karabakh issue, which we know in the 1997 article " War or peace? The time to get serious." The First President ran in the 1996 presidential election under the slogan ‘victory, stability, progress,’ and at that time there was no talk of peace, a time to get serious. Then that agenda was formulated the ‘exit strategy,’ in the modern vocabulary of the failed 1996 presidential election. I said in my speech back in the summer of 2016 (…) that at least in 2016 he [Ter-Petrosyan] accompanied [then President] Serzh Sargsyan in the negotiation process.

You know, there was a meeting with the First President in the summer of 2018, and I can open up secret as to what he said to me. He said, ‘You have to give the lands already.’ But in exchange for what? Why? How? The idea of the First President did not go beyond this frame. The rest is already a matter of assessment."