News - Pashinyan: Some countries used Karabakh issue to put ‘leash’ on Armenia

The delimitation between real and historical Armenia is extremely painful. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this in his address Wednesday during the parliamentary debates on the performance of the Armenian government in 2023. "The most intense of those painful spots is the following question: if what I said is the way leading to the future, what were our thousands of casualties for? What did our soldiers die for? I have asked that question many times in public, underscored giving a meaningful answer to it. The answer is as follows: our soldiers died for Armenia's statehood, independence, and sovereignty. I had occasion to say that my conclusion is that after the 1996 OSCE Lisbon Summit, the Nagorno-Karabakh issue did not exist, the issue of Armenia existed in the sense that the international architecture de jure predetermining the content of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue was already ready and unchangeable, recording that Nagorno-Karabakh cannot not be part of Azerbaijan. Avoiding this record, giving uncertain and vain hopes, some countries used the Nagorno-Karabakh issue to bind Armenia, known as ‘leash’ in our colloquialism, and to constrain its actions as an independent state," said the Armenian PM.