YEREVAN, JANUARY 25, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan believes that the President of Azerbaijan, the President of Artsakh and the Prime Minister of Armenia personally bear responsibility for peace and stability in the region.

“We are ready for constructive, normal work, as much as we understand how difficult of a work that is,” the PM said at a news conference on January 25.

“But that’s our responsibility in the region. I have told my colleagues, that now we – the President of Azerbaijan, the President of the Republic of Artsakh and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia – are personally bearing the responsibility of the future of peace and stability in the region. This is a personal responsibility, and to some extent also a common responsibility, and bearing this responsibility and [dealing] with it with honor is a very difficult task,” he said.

Asked to elaborate on the NK talks, the PM emphasized that there is no secrecy around the negotiations.  “It is described and termed in my speech at the 2019 March joint Security Council session of Armenia and Artsakh in Stepanakert”, Pashinyan said. “In that speech I had outlined our circle of discussions in the negotiations process. It is this circle that we are now talking about. Currently there is no paper on the table for us to discuss. And we must work together to approach a more specific, more substantiated discussion phase,” the Armenian PM added.

He said this period of time must be used efficiently to approach that phase, but at the same time noted that it hasn’t been used too effectively due to certain objective and subjective reasons. As the most important reason he pointed out that Azerbaijan hasn’t appropriately responded to his statement on any option of settlement of the NK conflict having to be acceptable for the people of Armenia, the people of Artsakh and the people of Azerbaijan.

“This, if we were to express is on a conceptual level today, is the biggest obstacle to the resolution process. But our stance is constructive, we find that the Karabakh issue must be resolved, resolved within the circle of concept and principles that I had said in Stepanakert, within the circle of the logic of my speeches at the UN, and within the framework of the principles that we have declared previously”.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan