Now see how painfully it is accepted by all of us that 3 territories must be returned. And how painful it would have been in that situation. This is what Nikol Pashinyan said during an appearance on the Public Television company’s airwaves, answering the question of why he did not address the public during the war and say: this is the situation, if we continue, it will be much worse, so that the war could be stopped sooner.
“That is, that decision was made at the moment when it became obvious that the struggle no longer made sense. Before that, there was no such situation where the struggle made no sense. Our army truly fought until the end, until the last minute,” said Pashinyan.
To the question of whether they told him that day that it made no sense, he responded: “I was told those days that it must be stopped urgently. Of course, before that too there were problems related to possibilities, but we tried to solve those problems — supplies, air defense, and so on — in some way. You must correctly understand our political task: when the failures at the front began, the political task we had formulated was to introduce a turning point in the logic, and for that we did everything possible. This decision was made at the time when we understood that it was meaningless to formulate such a task.
What is the point where we recorded that, that point is the fall of Shushi. In all possible scenarios of stopping the war before Shushi, Shushi had to be surrendered without a battle. I, for example, said: I cannot surrender Shushi. We cannot do that, because Shushi has special significance.”
Pashinyan noted that in the negotiation content of the Karabakh issue there are many ambiguities that must be interpreted this way or that way, but there is one thing that was certain, and that is the return of those 7 regions: “For 25 years, in essence, that formulation was placed on the table, and in those 25 years we have not said no. In 2015 the co-chairmanship, in essence, came to an agreement that since there is one clear question where there is no dispute, let us come to an agreement to solve the territories issue with 5+2. In connection with this situation, the probability of war has been discussed very often. But the logic of this war is in this: that in this war the Armenian side had the purpose of resisting that scenario.”
