Belarusian President Lukashenko once again stated that “Pashinyan has little guilt” in the Karabakh issue, because the previously unresolved problem accumulated and “crushed on his head”. Lukashenko says that in the past he had the role of an unwitting mediator, but the Armenian government did not respond to Baku’s impulses. It seems that the President of Belarus is absolutely right: the unresolved conflict “exploded” on Nikol Pashinyan’s “head”.
But the question arises again: did Nikol Pashinyan not know about this, when he claimed the position of the head of the political power of Armenia, the first person in Armenia, did he not study the Karabakh problem, did he not imagine what the situation is around it, what risks there are and etc: At the same time, we are not talking about the disciplinary information at all, but only about what exists in the public field. Even more so, the status of a deputy gave Pashinyan significant access to information about the council itself.
However, during the entire period of the revolutionary process initiated by him, he did not say anything significant about the Artsakh conflict, he did not touch this issue with the public in any way. Pashinyan started talking about it already after he became the prime minister, and here his responsibility has increased even more, because he already had a substantial knowledge of advisory information, therefore, a sufficient basis for an effective dialogue with the public. But, at least until the 44-day ceasefire, Nikol Pashinyan spoke in a radically different logic than the situation Lukashenko is talking about.
And this was admitted by Pashinyan himself, declaring after the war that his main mistake was that he did not talk to the public about the need for settlement and compromise in order to avoid casualties. But, the whole tragedy or tragic paradox is that it is not possible to talk about it, unless there is no doubt about one thing: that everything is ready, conditionally speaking, for signing, and all that remains is for the Prime Minister of Armenia to receive the approval of the public.
If everything is not ready for that, then the Prime Minister of Armenia, whoever he is, cannot present to the public an “either-or” situation, because just such a picture was presented, the opposite side, and in this case, the parties, were essentially going to build on it their new the game and the new benchmark of trade and demand. Let me repeat, if we are not talking about when everything is fully agreed and the Armenian yes remains. And the situation, to put it mildly, was far from such a point.
According to this, Pashinyan’s main mistake is not that he did not present to the public “either-or” before the war, but that after the revolution he did not contribute to providing an environment of truly viable public solidarity and intra-public-political dialogue that would allow Armenia have both greater negotiation flexibility and defensive resilience at the same time. And the problem today is that this mistake continues in practice.
