Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has defended his government’s sharp increase in foreign debt, stating that much of the additional $8 billion was taken on because Armenia urgently needed weapons and had no suppliers willing to sell them — with the exception of Russia.
Speaking in parliament on Thursday, Pashinyan said Armenia had been effectively isolated on the international arms market for years.
‘Before 2022, only one country — Russia — was willing to sell weapons to Armenia’, he said.
‘Other countries refused, saying they had no guarantee we would use those weapons to defend our internationally recognised territory [referring to Nagorno-Karabakh]. They believed we might use them beyond that territory, and that was unacceptable to them’.
Pashinyan argued that this situation forced the government to rely on large-scale borrowing once new opportunities to purchase weapons emerged.
‘You say the foreign debt has increased by $8 billion — what have you done? Don’t you know what we have done? We bought weapons’, he said. ‘We bought weapons on credit because we needed them urgently and all at once’.
Pashinyan insisted that the purchases were necessary to address vulnerabilities that, he claimed, had accumulated over decades. He said he was ready to publicly show the newly acquired equipment and compare it with the state of the army under previous administrations.
Pashinyan also noted that part of the borrowed funds had been used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Don’t you know there was a coronavirus? We took out loans so that the country could overcome the pandemic during the war’, he said.
Turning to the peace negotiations on Nagorno-Karabakh, Pashinyan reiterated that Armenia had faced unacceptable demands. He claimed that earlier negotiating frameworks effectively required Armenia to offer up its sovereignty.
‘We will publish those negotiation documents by the end of the year’, he said.
He again argued that the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh had been used for decades to keep Armenia in a position of dependency on outsiders.
‘They kept us in their pocket, using Karabakh as bait’, he said.
Pashinyan insisted that his political team had preserved Armenia’s statehood.
‘Maybe it sounds immodest, but if we had not come to power in 2018, a sovereign Republic of Armenia would not exist today’, he told MPs.
Addressing criticism that his government distrusts people from Nagorno-Karabakh, Pashinyan said this was contradicted by the composition of the military leadership.
‘Half of our current Armed Forces leadership are people from Karabakh’, he said. ‘So if we allegedly don’t trust them, how did we appoint them? How do they work with us?’
The tensions between officials in Yerevan and Nagorno-Karabakh increased following the deployment of a Russian peacekeeping mission to the region in 2020, with officials in Stepanakert accusing Yerevan of giving up on the fight for a status for Nagorno-Karabakh.
