Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said he is “proud” to have led Armenia out of what he described as a trap, even at the cost of casualties and sacrifices.

He stated during a briefing that the Karabakh movement “did not serve Armenia and the Armenian people, but rather those who wanted Armenians to remain in the status of victims.”

“I am proud that I brought our state out of that trap, yes, at the cost of victims and sacrifices,” he said, according to Sputnik Armenia.

Pashinyan added that the Karabakh movement had reached a point with no way out, responding to remarks by Armenia’s third president Serzh Sargsyan.

In a statement marking the eighth anniversary of his resignation, Serzh Sargsyan said that stepping down amid a difficult negotiation phase on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, along with a change of negotiator and a reset of negotiations, had tragic consequences.

Pashinyan argued that the entire period after 1994 had effectively been about postponing war under various pretexts, specifically delaying its most intense phase, as the war itself had never truly been postponed.

“In our perception, there was a ‘no war, no peace’ situation, but we did not have that. We had war with varying intensity. That the outbreak of war could no longer be delayed was stated by Serzh Sargsyan himself from the National Assembly podium in April 2018,” Pashinyan said.

The prime minister also claimed that the public had been presented with incomplete narratives during previous negotiation processes.

“It says one thing there — that we deceived our people, brazenly deceived them,” he stated.

Referring to the 44-day war, Pashinyan said the public is already informed about those events and suggested that any report is unlikely to contain major new revelations. At the same time, he did not rule out its publication, emphasizing that its time will come.