News - PM: Karabakh authorities want to change power Armenia so as to hand country over to CSTO

We have said that we should lower the bar of our views on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. It is necessary to align our ideas with those of the international community because we cannot live in a consensus-minus-one regime continuously. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this in his address during the debates on the Armenian government's 2023 state budget performance, in the National Assembly Thursday He reiterated that it was his great failure not to do so back in 2018. Pashinyan said that he had proposed the leadership and political forces of Nagorno-Karabakh to meet, where he will present his ideas on this issue. “In the future, despite this situation, Nagorno-Karabakh not only did not lower the bar of its ideas, but on the contrary, it hardened its position even more," he added, in part. Pashinyan noted that it is a misconception that they say that you should demand the maximum in negotiations to get something acceptable. Pashinyan announced that in September 2023, he was not in favor of the departure of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, and had said that this would mean closing the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. "But the clerical-feudal elite of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, together with their CSTO sponsors, closed the Nagorno-Karabakh issue in the hope that it will help them close the Armenian issue as well, by establishing a puppet government in Armenia and effectively ending Armenia's independence. It didn't work and it won't work," Pashinyan announced. According to him, the Karabakh authorities not only surrendered itself to Azerbaijan, but also handed over to Azerbaijan the weapons of several billion dollars acquired at the cost of the hardships of the people of Armenia. "Now they have come [to Armenia], they want to make a change of power in Armenia, so that, as they handed over Karabakh, they will hand over Armenia to the CSTO. But I want to clearly tell the clerical-feudal elite: you cannot change the government in Armenia because you are powerless before the legitimacy born from the people. Only the sovereign, the people of Armenia, can change the government in Armenia whenever they want," added Pashinyan.