In his New Year’s Eve address to the nation, Pashinian said that his country is “entering 2025 in a significantly more peaceful, significantly more stable, significantly more secure environment, and significantly more independent, significantly more sovereign, significantly more confident than before.”
“The year 2024 has been the most peaceful and calm year for our country in the last twenty years, and this fact really needs to be analyzed deeply and seriously,” he said, adding that his policies will keep Armenia on that trajectory.
In that context Pashinian touted unilateral territorial concessions to Azerbaijan which he made last spring, sparking massive anti-government protests in Yerevan. He described them as a “success story.”
Pashinian’s domestic detractors maintain that the handover of four disputed border areas and Pashinian’s broader appeasement policy will not bring real peace and will only encourage Baku to seek more Armenian concessions.
Following the handover, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev renewed his demands for a change of Armenia’s constitution which he says contains territorial claims to his country. He went on to set other preconditions for an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. Those include the return of Azerbaijanis who lived in Soviet Armenia until the late 1980s and an end to Yerevan’s arms acquisitions.
Aliyev again demanded an end to those acquisitions in his New Year address to the nation, saying that they pose a security threat to Azerbaijan, the defense budget of which is almost three times higher than Armenia’s.
“I consider it my duty to once again warn the Armenian leadership to avoid this dangerous path,” he said, adding that “Armenia is unable to compete with us either militarily or in any other field.”
Armenian officials said earlier that Baku may be planning to launch another military aggression against Armenia after hosting the COP29 climate summit in November. Pashinian’s administration is anxious to prevent such invasion by negotiating the peace treaty.