Pashinyan comments on declassified U.S. documents about 1990s talks on Meghri-Karabakh exchange

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has commented on the declassified U.S. State Department documents revealing that the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiated the option of exchanging Armenia’s Meghri with Nagorno-Karabakh in the late 1990s.

RFE/RL’s Armenian service published a report about the documents on January 30.

Pashinyan said his recent statement on social media was about the facts presented in the report and the reason behind inviting the three former leaders of Armenia to a televised debate.

Quoting a part of the report where US Deputy Secretary of State Talbott warns about the consequences of a possible exchange in terms of further complicating the conflict, Pashinyan reacted by highlighting that the Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group had underscored in 1999 that the Nagorno-Karabakh issue must be resolved without changes in borders.

“This is what I have said, the statement I made that was followed by interpretations which I responded to with an invitation to a debate was about this. If they [former presidents] claim they had not recognized Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, then why are they giving a part of sovereign Armenian territory to Azerbaijan in order to take Karabakh,” Pashinyan said.

Pashinyan underscored that the declassification of the documents has closed the topic.

“There’s nothing to debate anymore. The published documents made the debates meaningless,” he said.