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Pashinyan: Forces led by Kocharyan, Karapetyan, and Tsarukyan are opening the door to war with Azerbaijan

20 March 2026 19:32 (UTC +04:00)

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has addressed the public regarding those calling for war, reports Armenian local media.

“It has been clearly stated that the forces led by Robert Kocharyan, Karen Karapetyan, and Gagik Tsarukyan have adopted a policy of revising the peace achieved between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This indicates that they are taking a path that opens the doors to war. These forces declare that they will reconsider the current peace and seek to achieve peace, including by force. This clearly means that they are not only opening the doors to war but also making it inevitable.

We must clearly state that this is a historic crossroads. Peace has been achieved between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and we have built this peace, which means firmly closing the doors to war. The forces I mentioned are now trying to open that door, and this poses an existential threat to Armenia’s security.

They speak about ‘guarantors.’ For any impartial observer, it is clear that this rhetoric actually creates the groundwork for the deployment of peacekeeping forces in the country.

We have all seen what consequences peacekeeping forces can lead to. These forces, which would cause the repetition of the same mistakes, must be decisively rejected.

To summarize, I would like to say that we have had a security guarantor. Moreover, the obligations of this guarantor were clearly defined in legal terms. However, this mechanism did not work, and history, including the history of the Armenian people, clearly demonstrates this.

Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan became possible only because we placed our hopes not on a guarantor, but on ourselves. We treated it as an issue we had to resolve ourselves. On the contrary, whenever our thinking was directed toward a guarantor, when we believed that some external force would solve our problems, it led each time to escalation, tension, war, and losses.

Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been achieved at the cost of heavy losses. However, we have now entered a new stage, transitioning from an agenda of survival to an agenda of development. All forces that seek to revise peace are trying to take us out of the development phase and return us to a struggle for survival. History shows that in such cases, we are forced to live not in our own country, but in others. That is why those promoting the idea of revising peace are, in fact, emissaries of foreign countries.”