Pashinyan answers Aliyev
The Civil Contract party received a mandate to open an era of peaceful development for Armenia and Artsakh in the 2021 snap elections, Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said when opening the cabinet meeting, adding that this mandate presupposes the creation of a favorable environment around our country, the opening of regional communications, regional stability and the establishment of local peace.
“After the elections, however, what we predicted happened and is happening: Azerbaijan is doing everything to hinder peace in the region; it will do so with a tactic that is also predictable, showing Armenia or Artsakh are supposedly against peace, they are against the demarcation processes, and it will create false grounds for building an aggressive policy, the manifestations of which we are seeing in recent days,” Pahinyan said. He stressed that the working group at the level of Russian, Armenian and Azerbaijani deputy prime ministers is carrying out quite constructive and effective work on the opening of regional communications, and Azerbaijan’s incomprehensible statements about the so-called Zangezur Corridor have nothing to do with the works of the working group and the January 11 statement made in Moscow.
“Azerbaijan makes statements on the corridor to disrupt the work of the trilateral working group and prevent the opening of regional communications, as Azerbaijan aims to continue the policy of the 30-year process of blockade of Armenia, but we will continue working in the trilateral working group to break the blockade with the support of our partners, we will achieve the opening of regional communications,” he said, adding that Azerbaijan is trying to present that Armenia is against and is trying to hinder the demarcation while it is Azerbaijan that is against the demarcation and because it has brought to the arena obviously falsified maps, trying to substantiate the presence of its armed forces in a number of parts of the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia.
He also said that Armenia will defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity by all possible and impossible means, including the the Armenian-Russian joint military group and the CSTO mechanisms.