Opinion | Sovereignty through defeat: Pashinyan’s reframing of Armenia’s post-2020 reality
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s recent comments on the Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict reflect a reframing of history for propaganda needs.
On 23 August, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan marked the anniversary of Armenia’s Declaration of Independence with yet another controversial address that sought to reinterpret the country’s modern history. He argued that the 1990 declaration, though a milestone, was shaped by the Karabakh movement and a Soviet-era model of conflict-driven patriotism that ultimately hindered Armenia’s ability to build genuine statehood.
This narrative regarding the Declaration of Independence is not new. Pashinyan has been repeating it publicly since 2022, speaking extensively about the need to reevaluate both Armenia’s modern and earlier history. This rhetoric is closely tied to Azerbaijan’s demand that Armenia change its constitution and remove references to the 1990 declaration, which cites the 1989 decision of Soviet Armenia’s Supreme Council on unification with Nagorno-Karabakh. Pashinyan and his government appear ready to adopt a new constitution, though they deny that this initiative is linked to Baku’s demands. In the meantime, they are preparing the population for such changes, and the historical reinterpretations serve as part of that effort.
What was even more striking in the 23 August speech — and a logical continuation of the above-mentioned narrative — was Pashinyan’s explanation of why he had not made concessions before the Second Karabakh War. He argued that ‘as a result of those concessions, all the threats and dependencies we had, would have further increased, would have increased disproportionately, leading to the loss of Armenia’s independence and statehood’.
Nate Ostiller
Two months earlier, speaking in parliament, Pashinyan had already advanced the same logic. He declared that Armenia ‘did not lose Nagorno-Karabakh, but instead found the Republic of Armenia’.
These statements are revealing because they represent a recent shift in the government’s narrative regarding its responsibility in the period leading up to the Second Karabakh War.
In the years immediately after 2020, Pashinyan argued that instead of accusing him of intending to cede land before the war, the legitimate critique would have been the opposite — why he did not make concessions to prevent it. He even stated on several occasions that the war could have been prevented, but at the price of surrendering the seven regions adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh.
Now, even that limited admission of responsibility has disappeared. Instead, Pashinyan contends that concessions would only have increased Armenia’s dependence on Russia, alluding to the so-called ‘Lavrov Plan’ involving the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh. But here lies the paradox: this exact scenario materialised after the war, only under far worse conditions — after a devastating defeat, massive territorial losses, and thousands of casualties. And yet, Pashinyan now presents this as a path that supposedly strengthened Armenia’s sovereignty.
The evolution of rhetoric since 2020 illustrates this shift. Immediately after the war, the government and ruling party explained the defeat through structural arguments, emphasising Armenia’s objective disadvantages and imbalances with Azerbaijan on the eve of the conflict. In early 2021, a 2017 report by a state-owned think tank, highlighting Armenia’s lag behind Azerbaijan in critical infrastructure at a 10-to-1 ratio, was repeatedly cited by Pashinyan and other officials. This was a legitimate point, but it presented only part of the picture, omitting the non-structural factors behind Armenia’s defeat — namely, the government’s decisions and policies in the lead-up to and during the war.
By 2022, however, the government’s effort to explain the Nagorno-Karabakh catastrophe shifted toward reframing the negotiation process between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the years before the war. A turning point came with Pashinyan’s ‘lowering the bar’ speech in April 2022, after which the government began to reinterpret the entire peace process — often adopting elements of Azerbaijan’s framing and misrepresenting multiple details of proposals. Pashinyan spearheaded this campaign, arguing that by the time the 2018 Velvet Revolution occurred, there was no real possibility for Nagorno-Karabakh to have a status outside of Azerbaijan. In a more recent statement, he went further, declaring that the entire peace process since 1994 had been about returning Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
The reality of peace proposals and mediation efforts prior to the Second Karabakh War, however, was more nuanced. They did not offer a black-and-white choice between independence or Azerbaijani control, as Pashinyan suggests. The main idea was to delay the final decision on Nagorno-Karabakh’s status, while granting it an interim status and de facto self-governance. Tellingly, Pashinyan has been reluctant to publish the Minsk Group proposal that was on the table in 2020, just before the war.
These often frivolous and misleading reinterpretations of the pre-2020 peace process became the core of Pashinyan’s testimony before the parliamentary commission investigating the 44-day war. It can be argued that one of the commission’s main goals was to legitimise these narratives and ease the government’s responsibility for its policies and actions before and during the Second Karabakh War.
The more recent claims — that concessions would have doomed Armenia, or that sovereignty was only ‘found’ after defeat — represent the culmination of this trajectory: a narrative in which loss itself is recast as victory.
These statements reflect the government’s broader strategy since the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023: avoiding direct responsibility for defeat while reframing its consequences as an opportunity. This is a selective reinterpretation that shifts the emotional weight of events. It is a textbook post-truth tactic: acknowledging facts in a narrow sense while altering their meaning for the public.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
The problem is that the facts on the ground contradict these narratives. Armenia’s army was decisively beaten in 2020 and has not recovered its capabilities. The country remains dependent on outside powers for security, often forced to plead for external assistance. In this situation, the idea that Armenia has ‘found itself’ or become more sovereign is difficult to reconcile with reality — especially when parts of Armenia’s sovereign territory remain under Azerbaijani occupation.
Moreover, the fact that Yerevan has been able to diversify its foreign policy and security ties in recent years is a direct consequence of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, not the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh. As Moscow became mired in Ukraine, it lost its traditional role in the South Caucasus, creating a power vacuum. Its failure to fulfill its obligations toward Armenia after the September 2022 Azerbaijani attack forced Yerevan to begin diversification. This was not part of a pre-defined strategy, but an ad hoc reaction to a changing geopolitical reality.
The persistence of these narratives is best understood through political necessity. The question of responsibility for the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh will weigh heavily on Pashinyan and his party for years. As elections approach, this issue will inevitably resurface. By reframing defeat as discovery and abusing the notion of sovereignty, the government hopes to manage these debates and criticism.
In the end, these arguments reflect propaganda needs more than a genuine effort to reevaluate Armenia’s recent history. They aim to reframe defeat in a way that allows the government to avoid accountability and prepare for electoral battles in which the memory of 2020 will inevitably resurface. The claim that Armenia ‘found itself’ in the wake of Nagorno-Karabakh’s loss is less an assessment of statehood than a political device — designed to turn one of Armenia’s greatest national tragedies into a supposed achievement.
