RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan today addressed in the National Assembly the statement made by former Chief of the General Staff Onik Gasparyan.
“On 17 November 2020, then still Chief of the General Staff, Onik Gasparyan declared that on the 4th day of the war, during a Security Council meeting, he had presented our losses and the Armed Forces’ assessment of the situation created, noting that within 2-3 days measures needed to be taken to stop the war. From this rostrum I want to say responsibly: that point of Gasparyan’s statement has no connection with reality. Onik Gasparyan did not say such a thing; that is officially recorded, including by audio recording. On the contrary, he said that the reference was to the Security Council meeting of 30 September, that the adversary had made no advance, that the Armed Forces were carrying out the task set before them and would carry it out to the end.”
Pashinyan stressed that the former Chief of the General Staff could not have made such a statement on 30 September either: “In the report of the Security Council meeting of 21 August 2020, Gasparyan assured that on the Artsakh direction we could, with the forces available, and also with the means available, on the principle of ‘not one step back’, repel and defeat the adversary’s attack and crush its groupings.”
Nikol Pashinyan added, however, that all this does not mean that the RA leadership did not take measures to establish a ceasefire at the earliest possible moment, presenting in detail the process of reaching the agreements of the three ceasefires declared through the efforts of the mediators during the war. Seconds after the ceasefire declarations, Azerbaijan violated the agreement every time.
“Analysing the situation, consulting with the President of Artsakh and the General Staff of the Armed Forces, I decided that we had to reach a ceasefire through the path of certain, yes, also heavy concessions.” This was stated by RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan while presenting the report on the course and results of the implementation of the government programme for 2020, referring to the developments that took place before and after 19 October 2020.
“In that connection I convened a Security Council meeting, in which representatives of parliamentary forces also participated. The opposition also participated in the meeting, and I told them that I had convened them not to share responsibility with them, but to inform them, because at that moment I could not make a public statement about what was happening, since if the other side suddenly did not accept our proposal, those statements would not have had a positive effect on the overall situation. The President of the RA and the Catholicos also participated in the Security Council meeting.
The same day I convened the representatives of the extra-parliamentary opposition and informed them of the situation.
After that, in accordance with the agreement, I called the President of the Russian Federation and said that we wanted a ceasefire on the condition of the return of Azerbaijan’s territories in the 5+2 format. A condition that had previously been proposed to the RA by the mediators in various formats. We had a detailed discussion with Putin, and we reached a common understanding and recorded that with the President of the Russian Federation we formulate in the same way, or have a common formulation, for overcoming the situation,” said Pashinyan.
He stressed that there was the question of the return of refugees and of Azerbaijani internally displaced persons to Nagorno-Karabakh: “I said that we have no objection to that question and will not have, if the question is somehow linked to the process of clarifying the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. After that, the President of the Russian Federation had a conversation with Aliyev, as a result of which it became clear that Azerbaijan categorically does not accept our demand for the de-occupation of the Hadrut region. Second, it demands that the question of the return of internally displaced persons not be linked in any way to the clarification of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. There is also a new detail that I have not mentioned before: there was also an expectation that there should not be a return of territories in the 5+2 formula, but a return of 7 territories.”
Pashinyan said that Azerbaijan did not accept the agenda of clarifying the status of Nagorno-Karabakh either before the war or during it: “This, note, was the main cause of the April 4-day war of 2016 and the 44-day war of 2020.
