YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said that Armenia bears its share of responsibility but the failures of the Russian peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh shouldn’t be ignored.

Addressing the nation live on Thursday, PM Pashinyan commented on Russian media claims that Armenia is trying to blame Russia for its own failures.

“We are not shifting responsibility of any of our failures on anyone. There is the clear 9 November 2020 trilateral statement, by which the Lachin Corridor was supposed to be under the full control of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, the Russian peacekeeping contingent was supposed to oversee the safety of the civilian population. And we’ve been consistently raising this issue for over one and a half years, raising that the processes aren’t proceeding in the right course. We bear our share of responsibility, but I don’t think that we all should turn a blind eye on the failures that the Russian peacekeeping contingent has had in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Pashinyan said, mentioning the deadly incident in 2022 when Russian peacekeepers had assured a farmer in Nagorno-Karabakh that it was safe to conduct agricultural work but the farmer was shot dead by an Azeri sniper in the presence of the peacekeepers.

“Why did this latest outbreak happen? If the peacekeepers were able to agree a ceasefire, why couldn’t they do so before the attack, so that an attack on Nagorno-Karabakh wouldn’t have happened? After all, we’ve all been warning about this, we were saying that Nagorno-Karabakh is blockaded by Azerbaijani military equipment. Why didn’t this mediation take place back then? These are questions that require answers,” the Armenian PM said.