“Armenia is not against starting the border delimitation and demarcation with Azerbaijan in the area of four villages of the Tavush Province of the Republic of Armenia and the Qazax District of the Azerbaijani Republic,” Pashinian said in parliament on Wednesday during the debate on the fulfilment in 2023 of his government’s 2021-2026 program.
Talks about the start of the border delimitation and demarcation process in Tavush began in March when Pashinian traveled to this northeastern province to meet with residents of local communities situated next to the mentioned villages.
Pashinian signaled his readiness to accept Baku’s demands for Armenian withdrawal from those villages, but did not make their handover conditional on the liberation of any Armenian territory occupied by Azerbaijani forces in the early 1990s and in 2021-2022. He said Azerbaijan would go to war unless Armenia handed those territories back.
The statement prompted strong condemnation from opposition leaders and serious concern from residents of several Tavush villages that would be affected by the withdrawal. The villagers said they would lose access to their land, have trouble communicating with the rest of the country and be far more vulnerable from Azerbaijani armed attacks.
Speaking in parliament today, Pashinian repeated that the Armenian withdrawal from the four villages did not guarantee security for Armenia in the future, did not guarantee that Azerbaijan would not launch a new aggression against sovereign Armenian territory or that Azerbaijan would withdraw from the agricultural lands of more than three dozen Armenian villages it currently occupies. But he said that Armenia’s refusal to address the issue guarantees “a continued increase of security threats, a new attack on the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia and Azerbaijan’s refusal to return the agricultural lands of our villages.”
Pashinian said that it is these “negative guarantees” that “must first be eliminated.”
In his remarks the Armenian prime minister again made a case for espousing what he described as a “real Armenia” – the country within its current internationally recognized borders – as against a “historical Armenia” that he said is “incompatible with the real Armenia and often comes into conflict with it.”
“The process of demarcation between the real and historical Armenias is much more painful [than the process of demarcation with Azerbaijan] also because this process is taking place inside each of us, revealing unexpected layers and nuances,” Pashinian said, stressing that “the historical Armenia does not recognize the territorial integrity of the real Armenia.”
“Wittingly or unwittingly, the historical Armenia resonates with [the narratives of] a number of countries that have claims to the sovereignty, independence and territory of the real Armenia. After all, the territorial integrity of the real Armenia and its internationally recognized borders are also a limiting factor in terms of the appetites of these countries,” the Armenian premier said without naming the countries.
Pashinian stressed that it is the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh and the 2022 border clashes with Azerbaijan that led him to realize that it is the reaffirmation of the internationally recognized territory of Armenia that can become “an additional and decisive factor in ensuring the short-term, medium-term and long-term security of our country.”
“And from that moment the political-psychological process began, a process that can be called a demarcation between the real and historical Armenias,” Pashinian said.
Speaking about the current state of Armenian-Russian relations, the Armenian prime minister said that they are not experiencing their “best times” at present.
He said that Yerevan did “nothing wrong” in relations with Moscow, while again criticizing Russia for failing to address Armenia’s security needs.
“We don’t want to argue with the Russian Federation not only because we don’t have the opportunity and strength to do so, but because we appreciate the positive things that happened in our relations,” Pashinian said.
He underscored that a transition from relations between “historical Armenia with Russia” to relations between “real Armenia with Russia” is currently underway.
Meanwhile, a Kremlin spokesman on Wednesday described Armenia as a close partner of Moscow, saying that the importance of relations between Armenia and Russia is “difficult to overestimate.”
“You know that Armenia is our close partner, it is our ally. [It is] the country with which we are united by many integration formats, such as the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and others, and, of course, historical bilateral relations, humanitarian relations, the importance of which is difficult to overestimate,” Dmitry Peskov said, as quoted by Russian news agency TASS.
He also said that “in the foreseeable future”, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Armenian Prime Minister Pashinian will be able to personally discuss all issues in relations between the two countries.
“We hope that in the foreseeable future there will be an opportunity for the leaders to personally discuss such issues, if they are on the agenda,” the Kremlin spokesman said.