Pashinyan challenges former presidents to debate on Nagorno-Karabakh negotiations

On Monday, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan proposed a live debate with three former Armenian Presidents to discuss the decades-long negotiation process with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. All three refused Pashinyan’s invitation.

Pashinyan invited the former presidents — Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan, and Serzh Sargsyan — claiming on Facebook that since the 1994 Russian-mediated ceasefire between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh, the negotiation process was always about returning Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.

Debates about the ceasefire and subsequent negotiations have been a mainstay in Armenian politics, with politicians regularly trading blame about the failure of talks and the eventual surrender of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023. As he was Prime Minister at the time, Pashinyan has been particularly singled out for criticism.

‘The negotiation process had no other content. Talks about other content were introduced in the Republic of Armenia exclusively to solve domestic political problems’, Pashinyan alleged in his post.

He further wrote that he had made a ‘big mistake’ after becoming familiarised with the content of the negotiations in 2018, the year he came to power through the Velvet Revolution, noting that he did not admit such facts to himself due to ‘patriotism’. He added that this was why he has not previously explained such facts to the Armenian people.

Following Pashinyan’s invitation, all three former presidents, one after another, rejected the offer.

‘It would be extremely beneficial for our state and society if Nikol Pashinyan first and foremost debates with Nikol Pashinyan. As a result, I am sure both sides of the debate will fairly justify the other to be a liar’, Ter-Petrosyan’s spokesperson, Arman Musinyan, wrote on Facebook.

In turn, Bagrat Mikoyan, the head of the Kocharyan’s office, suggested in a statement posted on Kocharyan’s official Facebook page that ‘a controversial topic is necessary for a debate’.

‘It is an indisputable historical fact, that the surrender of the sovereign territories of Artsakh and Armenia is the personal “achievement” of the current prime minister and it is obvious to all reasonable people’, Mikoyan wrote.

Sargsyan’s office told PastInfo that it was ‘pointless to argue about the obvious’, and blamed Pashinyan for doing ‘everything to fail the negotiation process’.

‘If he really wants to debate, we advise him to engage in a debate with the presidents of the [OSCE Minsk Group] co-chairing countries — Russia, the US, and France — who, between 2009 and 2013, five times announced the negotiation format and the principles on which the Nagorno-Karabakh issue should have been resolved’.

Pashinyan continues to push for debate

Following the rejections, Pashiyan made four other posts on Facebook, further reiterating his offer and responding to the refusals.

On Monday evening, Pashinyan posted a video on Facebook in which he called on them to ‘think once again and take advantage of this opportunity for a face-to-face debate’.

He added that this was actually ‘a moment of truth’, noting that the proposed debate should have ‘the utmost importance in helping the people reach a final and indisputable conclusion’ about what happened since Armenia’s independence and who is guilty of what.

On Tuesday afternoon, Pashinyan again posted on Facebook, urging the three former presidents to engage with him.

‘And if you argue, let's put the arguments face to face in front of the people and not produce tongue twisters in diplomatic language, with the hope and faith that still most people do not know that language’, he wrote.

After receiving negative responses from the former presidents, Pashinyan addressed his audience with a question: ‘Do I understand correctly that the three presidents are finally and irrevocably refusing public debate?’

This was followed by yet another post in which Pashinyan reiterated his position that the negotiations ‘could only have one outcome — the actual return of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan’.

Pashinyan also noted that, hereafter, whatever the three former presidents or their representatives say on this issue ‘holds no value now’, and again extended an offer to debate if the former presidents changed their mind.

On Tuesday evening, former Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian ‘[threw] down the gauntlet’, asking Pashinyan for a debate on the condition that after losing, Pashinyan would ‘promise’ to the nation to change his policy on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.

This is not the first time Pashinyan has made statements on the Nagorno-Karabakh negotiations, statements that Armenian fact-checkers have said do not correspond to reality.

In December 2023, Pashinyan stated that his government ‘wanted to bring our understanding of [Nagorno-Karabakh] self-determination into line with the understanding of the international community about self-determination’.

Pashinyan was referring to the Lisbon Summit of 1996, which resulted in a declaration that the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict should include the recognition of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and the high autonomy of Nagorno-Karabakh within it.However, the section was vetoed by Ter-Petrosyan and did not end up in the final adoption of the text. Nonetheless, the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Swiss Foreign Minister Flavio Cotti, issued a statement, attached as an annex to the final document, that supported the notion of autonomy within Azerbaijan.

For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.