News - Armenia's Pashinyan: Karabakh issue has no longer existed at least since 1996

What we wanted on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue was no longer possible at least after the December 1996 Lisbon summit of the OSCE. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this in his remarks Thursday during the debates on the 2024 state budget draft in the National Assembly of Armenia. "Those who joined the ‘Consensus 1’ of that summit—moreover, the ‘1’ was Armenia—were assuring us [Armenia] in the closed areas of official meetings and restaurants that it is possible and will definitely happen, and they constantly were encouraging us, had one goal in mind: to prevent the establishment of a state in Armenia. "Their strategic scenario was exactly this: to use the Karabakh issue as a lever to not allow the development of Armenia's statehood, to not allow the solution of the Karabakh issue under any scenario until it is not possible to also resolve the matter of Armenia in such a way that de facto or de jure Armenia ceases to exist as an independent state. "The Karabakh issue has no longer existed at least since 1996. A ‘question of Republic of Armenia’ has existed. The events of 1998, 1999—in particular, October 27—, 2020, 2023 should be viewed in this context," the Armenian PM said. Pashinyan asked whether we could have realized all this earlier, and without going through these disasters. "We could have only in one case: a change in thinking. But it that not difficult, but impossible because the patriotic, extreme provincial model formed in communist times would not allow us to do that," he added.