Azerbaijan dropped hints for 7 regions’ 'immediate return' after October 19 – Nikol Pashinyan

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Wednesday briefed the parliament on the developments in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) after October 19, saying that the "painful concessions", discussed amid heavy military clashes, had to be agreed upon to avoid further losses.

According to the prime minister, Azerbaijan insisted on the seven regions’ “immediate return” instead of the initially agreed 5+2 formula. “After an analysis of the situation and consultations with the president of Artsakh and the chief of the General Headquarters of the Armed Forces, I decided that we had to reach a ceasefire through heavy concessions,” he said in his speech at the National Assembly.

“I convened the Security Council, bringing together representatives of parliamentary factions, including the opposition forces. And I said, by the way, that I had invited the opposition not for sharing responsibility with them but for just letting them know that I could not possibly make any public statement on what was going on, because should the opposing side fail to accept our proposal, those statements would not positively affect our general situation,” he said, adding that the meeting was attended also by the President and the Supreme Patriarch of Armenia.  

“I invited representatives of the extra-parliamentary opposition the same day to keep them up to date of the ongoing developments. I repeated on purpose that I had not invited them for sharing responsibility, or shifting any responsibility to them,” he added.

Pashinyan said he later called Russian President Vladimir Putin (according to the agreed plan) to negotiate the regions’ return in the 5+2 format. “That condition, in a vast variety of formats, was the mediators' proposal to Armenia also in the past,” he said, elaborating also on a “common understanding” reached with the Russian leader.

“You know about the proposed return of refugees, i.e. – the internally displaced Azerbaijanis to Karabakh. And I said we had no principled objection to the issue - and would not have any in case we ever associated it with the status of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Pashinyan said, adding that the Russian president talked to the Azerbaijani leader afterwards to hear his rebuff of the proposal for de-occupying Hadrut and the surrounding settlements.

“Secondly they demanded that the return of the internally displaced – including to Shushi – never be associated with the clarification of status. That’s also a new detail, which I admittedly never stated before. Additionally, they dropped a hint for the seven regions’ return - instead of the 5+2 formula,” he added.

Pashinyan also went on to explain the reasons behind his detailed account. “Azerbaijan never in essence – either before or during the war – accepted the agenda of clarifying the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan drastically refused, from certain a moment, to bring Nagorno-Karabakh’s status into the agenda - or to discuss it as an agenda item. And that was practically the root cause behind both the 2016 Four-Day War and the 44-day war in 2020,” he said. 

The text of Pashinyan's speech was published by his spokesperson, Mane Gevorgyan, on Facebook.