Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has announced that Armenia will release key negotiation documents related to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh by the end of this year, following the recent comments of former presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan, which Pashinyan described as confession on they used the conflict as a tool aimed at undermining Armenia’s statehood.
Writing on his Facebook page, Pashinyan asserted: ‘All peace offers were about shortening the leash. The objective of that leash-shortening process was the end of the Republic of Armenia’. He said that Armenia ‘managed to step out of that scenario’ only thanks to the sacrifices of its fallen and the historical intuition of its people.
The former presidents, in separate media appearances, had criticised Pashinyan’s handling of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 and subsequent negotiations with Azerbaijan. Kocharyan claimed that Armenia refused to negotiate in 2019 and that the whole process was deliberately designed to provoke conflict. Sargsyan, in turn, alleged that the Armenian Army’s decline, negotiation avoidance, and external intelligence advantages given to Azerbaijan led to the war.
Kocharyan said that the ceasefire agreement that brought an end to the war was an ‘opportunity’ for Armenia to keep Nagorno-Karabakh under Armenian control. ‘At that time, we had to stick to that document and do everything to bring it to life’, Kocharyan said.
Pashinyan responded by saying ‘The recent statements by K.R. and S.S. reaffirm that the Nagorno-Karabakh issue has been in the hands of certain forces whose aim was to keep the Republic of Armenia on a short leash. The language of “peoples’ rights”, “historical justice”, and similar terms has only served to cover up that primary objective’.
‘By the end of the year the negotiating documents will be published, and this will become even clearer’, Pashinyan wrote.
The latest round of remote debates between Pashinyan and the former Armenian leaders comes ahead of the next parliamentary elections in June 2026 and after Armenia and Azerbaijan initialed a peace agreement in Washington in August 2025, committing themselves to a full treaty.
The Armenian opposition does not accept the conditions of the peace treaty, calling it a one-sided solution that ignores Armenia’s security issues and saying it is based on Yerevan’s concessions to Baku.
