Levon Zurabian said that Pashinian has gained nothing in return for meeting Baku’s key demand.
“We can see that his move was followed not by a softening of Azerbaijan’s position but by a more aggressive stance [adopted by Baku,]” Zurabian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
He pointed to the recent tightening of Azerbaijan’s six-month blockade of Karabakh’s land link with Armenia and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s threats of fresh military action against Karabakh.
Pashinian publicly acknowledged his readiness to sign a peace deal upholding Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh after his May 14 talks with Aliyev held in Brussels. The statement drew strong condemnation from the Armenian opposition and Karabakh’s leadership.
Zurabian suggested that Pashinian had naively expected that Baku will reciprocate by lifting the blockade or come under strong Western pressure to agree to an international format of negotiations with the Karabakh Armenians. He described the prime minister’s failure to make his recognition conditional on such concessions beforehand as a manifestation of gross incompetence.
“What Pashinian is doing is an unprecedented technique in the history of diplomacy,” said the deputy chairman of Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress party.
Zurabian insisted that Pashinian has not even secured a formal Azerbaijani recognition of Armenia’s existing borders. He argued that Azerbaijani troops show no signs of preparing to withdraw from Armenian border areas occupied by them after the 2020 war in Karabakh.
Pashinian’s Karabakh policy has been praised by the European Union and the United States. The U.S. State Department last week also hailed Aliyev’s stated readiness to grant “amnesty” to Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian leaders if they resign and “surrender” to Baku.
Ter-Petrosian and his political team have long advocated a compromise solution to the Karabakh conflict. The 78-year-old ex-president stated last September the Armenian opposition should help Pashinian accept “painful solutions” backed by the international community. But he has not yet personally commented on Pashinian’s latest moves denounced by Zurabian.