Tuesday, 2 December 2025
What does the Karabakh negotiation package reveal?
In accordance with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statement, key documents related to the Karabakh negotiation process have been published (available at https://www.gov.am/am/K-Negotiation-Documents/ ).
Some of them, in particular, the UN Security Council resolutions of 1992 and 1993, were already available on the Internet. The public documents were included in the package to demonstrate the full logic of the negotiation process.
What is the final conclusion from the published package? Perhaps it is that myths have existed in Armenia for decades around the Karabakh conflict, which, of course, were formed by the political elite that came to power through the Karabakh movement. They developed these myths to justify their coming to and staying in power, and they developed these myths to such an extent that it has become a mindset in Armenia, and looking beyond it is a political taboo, a betrayal.
Later, that taboo was used for political reproduction, and after each reproduction, the taboo became more hardened, being presented to the public as an absolute truth.
If this were a problem of intra-Armenian relations, it might be understandable. But the point is that the Karabakh conflict was an international problem, even if we put aside the regional context.
And the international perception of the issue was not only opposed to the ideas of the Karabakh movement in the beginning, but also developed in the opposite direction.
During and after the first Karabakh war, the negotiations on the settlement of the conflict were never about the independence of Karabakh or its unification with Armenia. The main subject of the negotiations was that all 7 regions surrounding Karabakh should be returned to Azerbaijan in a package or phased version, and the status of Karabakh itself should be negotiated only under the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan. This perception of the international community is clearly recorded in the following part of the statement of the chairman of the 1996 OSCE Lisbon Summit: “The legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh should reflected in an agreement based on self-determination, which will grant Nagorno-Karabakh the highest degree of self-government within Azerbaijan.”
This formulation shows that even the concept of “self-determination” has been mythologized among us, because in the perception of the international community, the right to self-determination for Nagorno-Karabakh meant “self-government” within Azerbaijan. Not autonomy, but self-government. This is also an important difference.
Having the principle of territorial integrity and the right to self-determination on the negotiating table at the same time meant that there could be no definition of the status of Karabakh without Azerbaijan’s consent, because Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. This is clearly stated in the UN Security Council resolution.
This is also stated in the ideas for determining the status of Nagorno-Karabakh by referendum, because these ideas were formulated in such a way that Azerbaijan had grounds to say that not only Azerbaijanis who had left Nagorno-Karabakh earlier, but also all citizens of Azerbaijan should participate in the referendum. In other words, the supposed referendum would take place not in Karabakh, but in all of Azerbaijan. Armenia did not agree with this interpretation, and the fact that the referendum did not take place and the process did not move forward meant that Azerbaijan’s position was decisive, because Karabakh was de jure considered part of Azerbaijan. This was also stated in the concepts of the exchange of territories and the common state.
And the longer time dragged on, the more Azerbaijan's positions hardened, without the possibility of returning to the initial, relatively more favorable negotiated options.
The documents show that after the non-violent, velvet, popular revolution of 2018, no other document or proposal was put on the negotiating table than was there before it. The date of another document attached to the paper presented by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs in 2019 is 2016, and the first sentence of the document shows that it was formulated at a time when the main negotiator on the issue was the President of the Republic of Armenia, not the Prime Minister. In other words, the document was formulated before the 2018 revolution.
Perhaps the most notable of the published documents is the letter of the third President of the Republic of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, to the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, which summarizes the current situation regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh negotiations as of August 5, 2016. And here a number of important notes should be made. First, Serzh Sargsyan makes assessments in that letter that show that: a) Serzh Sargsyan had an assessment of a high probability of resumption of military or warlike actions, b) he stated that the military balance between Armenia and Azerbaijan is upset, c) he emphasized that “the statement of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs on the interim or final status is not sufficient compensation for the actual transfer of territories”, d) Azerbaijan does not assume clear obligations regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh referendum and the interim status of Nagorno-Karabakh and as a justification for this assessment, he stated that Azerbaijani President Aliyev constantly refers to the Azerbaijani Constitution as an obstacle to holding a referendum in Nagorno-Karabakh, since he considers it an internal issue of Azerbaijan.
The letter shows that Serzh Sargsyan’s government saw a problem with the expected military-political support from Russia, otherwise there would be no need for this letter. The military balance had been upset, including as a result of Russia’s active arming of Azerbaijan. In addition, despite the generally unipolar foreign policy of the Republic of Armenia, which was supposedly aimed at gaining Russia’s favor in the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, approaches were put forward at the negotiating table by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (“Lavrov Plan”), which in 2016 put the Armenian authorities and Serzh Sargsyan in a hopeless situation.
That is why Serzh Sargsyan is addressing this letter to personally Vladimir Putin and not to the presidents of the United States or France, as the heads of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries. It is from that letter that we decipher that in August 2016, Serzh Sargsyan understood that he was in a hopeless situation, and if the approach of the Russian side did not change, then war was inevitable, and moreover, in the case of an upset military balance, it was inevitable, with a predictable outcome.
On the one hand, the uncompromising approaches to NK, and on the other hand, the lack of expected military-political support, in the conditions of about two decades of injecting the society with fabricated military-patriotic propaganda within the country, would have made it impossible to avoid war. That is why Serzh Sargsyan admitted in his famous speech to the National Assembly in April 2018 that the negotiations on the NK conflict were in fact at a deadlock.
Many have probably wondered why since May 2018, when Nikol Pashinyan had just assumed power, Serzh Sargsyan’s entire team was making incomprehensible accusations that Nikol Pashinyan has come to “surrender the lands.” The publication of the documents and Serzh Sargsyan’s letter to Vladimir Putin provides the answer to these questions. Serzh Sargsyan knew that war was now inevitable, and the outcome of the war was more than predictable. And he needed those statements about surrendering the lands for his political comeback later.
PS: It is also worth mentioning another aspect of the alleged interim status of Karabakh and the alleged referendum to determine its status. Both Robert Kocharyan's and Serzh Sargsyan's governments considered them an achievement, while the interim status meant the disintegration of the de facto status and governance of Nagorno-Karabakh since the 1990s and the establishment of a new Armenian-Azerbaijani governance, and the discussion of the idea of a future referendum meant the delegitimization of the independence referendum held in Nagorno-Karabakh on December 10, 1991. In other words, as a result of the negotiation process, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict had reached the zero point of 1991 in terms of content.
