Immediate handover of 5 territories out of 7, clear timetable for handing over the other two – Pashinyan on Azerbaijan’s demands

In the process of negotiations over the Karabakh issue, step by step Azerbaijan reached a point where it insisted that the Armenians of Karabakh should renounce their rights, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said, addressing the people on Wednesday.

“Their demand consisted in the following: Immediately hand over 5 out of 7 territories to Azerbaijan, develop a clear-cut timetable for handing over the remaining 2 territories and state that any status of Nagorno-Karabakh implied being part of Azerbaijan. Moreover, the status of Nagorno-Karabakh should not be associated with the transfer of territories. In other words, territories should be handed over not for status but for peace, otherwise Azerbaijan threatened to resolve the issue through war,” he said.

“Our government refused to discuss the issue in this way because it was unacceptable,” Pashinyan said.

He stressed that the July military actions showed that Azerbaijan’s army is not able to settle Karabakh issue in a military way.

“Turkey decided that it is up to them to deal with the Karabakh issue. Something unprecedented happened at that point: Turkey started to openly and publicly threaten Armenia, with a large number of terrorists and mercenaries being transported from Syria to the Karabakh conflict zone, realizing that the Azeri forces could not tackle the problem on their own,” the PM said.

"In this situation, we tried to implement strategic containment mechanisms, considering that if Turkey achieved its goals in the South Caucasus, it would inevitably lead to a chain reaction of events, involving regional and extra-regional stakeholders, which could result in specific restraining measures," Pashinyan said.
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