Newly released negotiation documents on the official Armenian government website gov.am contradict Nikol Pashinyan’s recent public statements regarding the history and substance of the Artsakh peace process.

On December 23, 2024, Pashinyan asserted that since the 1994 ceasefire the negotiations had been conducted on the assumption that Artsakh would return to Azerbaijan. He insisted that the talks contained no other content and accused critics of inventing alternative narratives. The documents now published make these claims incompatible with the historical record.

The released materials span more than two decades. They show that the negotiation process was never based on a single predetermined outcome. Instead, the documents reflect a structured and interlinked framework built around territorial arrangements, security mechanisms, and a final act of self-determination. They also show that successive Armenian governments prior to Pashinyan’s rule repeatedly resisted provisions that endangered Artsakh’s security or predetermining its final status.

One of the key disclosures is the June 2019 text titled “Declaration on the First Stage and Further Steps in the Artsakh Settlement.” Its content is nearly identical to earlier drafts negotiated during Serzh Sargsyan’s tenure in 2016 and 2018. This continuity demonstrates that the document presented to Pashinyan in 2019 was not new. It was an inherited framework that previous governments had examined critically and, when necessary, refused. This directly undermines the claim that earlier administrations had already conceded Artsakh’s destiny inside Azerbaijan.

Across all versions, the core elements remained consistent:

  • Return of five or seven surrounding districts to Azerbaijan, paired with the preservation of a land corridor between Armenia and Artsakh.
  • A legally binding referendum under UN or OSCE auspices to determine final status, with no restrictions on the ballot question and full respect for the outcome.
  • An interim status for Artsakh prior to the referendum, supported by internal governance mechanisms, security guarantees, and international monitoring.
  • Normalization of political, economic, and humanitarian relations.
  • Direct participation of Artsakh representatives in drafting the final settlement.
  • Continued involvement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, with adherence to the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and OSCE foundational principles presented as an integrated whole.

The record becomes even more explicit with the publication of Serzh Sargsyan’s confidential letter to Vladimir Putin dated 5 April 2016, written four days after the outbreak of the Four Day War. In that letter, Sargsyan warns that Azerbaijan’s insistence on immediate territorial return without a binding mechanism for determining Artsakh’s final status would leave Armenia and Artsakh in an untenable strategic position. He stresses that territorial concessions absent enforceable commitments would produce irreversible losses, and he explains that Azerbaijan was deliberately avoiding any genuine obligation to a referendum that included independence as an option.

This position is confirmed again in Sargsyan’s testimony of 17 April 2018, now published in full. He outlines the reasons Armenia had rejected proposals that compromised Artsakh’s security and status, and he details how Armenia resisted any sequence that reduced the final status question to an open-ended or symbolic procedure. His account is entirely inconsistent with Pashinyan’s statement of December 23 and reinforces the conclusion that the negotiations did not accept Artsakh inside Azerbaijan as a predetermined reality.

The broader diplomatic record in the documents reinforces these points:

  1. The 1996 Lisbon Principles, which attempted to define Artsakh within Azerbaijan, were formally rejected by Armenia. This rejection is recorded in the OSCE documents themselves.

  2. No negotiation framework from 1994 to 2018 eliminates the referendum. Every version retains a mechanism for a binding act of self-determination.

  3. Armenian-authored documents consistently warn of the asymmetry in the proposals. Armenia was expected to make irreversible territorial concessions, while Azerbaijan offered only political promises without enforceability.

  4. Azerbaijan repeatedly refused to commit to a referendum with an open ballot and binding legal force, which made a final settlement impossible.

  5. The 2019 document released by Pashinyan’s government is nearly identical to the drafts negotiated under his predecessors. This continuity proves that the negotiation architecture did not predetermine Artsakh’s status inside Azerbaijan and does not support Pashinyan’s claim of inherited inevitability.

The documents were published by the government itself. Their authenticity is unquestionable, and they leave no room for assertions that opponents have fabricated or misrepresented the negotiation record.


The publication of these documents has intensified public scrutiny. Critics argue that the disclosures reveal a deliberate mischaracterization of the negotiation process by Pashinyan and demonstrate that the current narrative does not correspond to the documented diplomatic history. The gap between public statements and the actual content of the negotiations has become increasingly visible and increasingly difficult to reconcile.