“Eight or nine months ago, I saw the document proposed by the Co-Chairs on the Artsakh issue in 2019, which Nikol Pashinyan concealed from the Armenian people, and I informed the Artsakh leadership of its existence,” Serzh Sargsyan, the third President of the Republic of Armenia, stated on the “Imnemnim” podcast.
“The fact that the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs made a new proposal to the Armenian leadership and presented a new document was hidden from the public. For a long time, almost a year, we talked about the existence of a new document, and they said it didn’t exist. It didn’t exist, but the Foreign Minister attended meetings, he wasn’t there, but we received information that such a document existed. For example, I told the leadership of the Republic of Artsakh that such a document existed. “I said, ‘Go to that governor and ask him to show you this document,'” Serzh Sargsyan said, adding that the Artsakh leadership was completely unaware of this new proposal.
“They were surprised and said, ‘How can there be a document we don’t know about?'”
Later, in 2020, as Serzh Sargsyan noted, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced the existence of such a document. Even with this document, a settlement could have been reached through compromise, but Armenia’s current rulers even thwarted one of these last opportunities.
“True, during our negotiations, the free expression of the will of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh was singled out as a separate clause, and this was mentioned in the preamble. But this would have allowed, in the event of normal negotiations, to highlight this clause and move toward a solution to the problem, had the negotiations been conducted correctly,” Serzh Sargsyan stated.