Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan, in a statement marking the 35th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence of Armenia, said the key ideological provisions of the document, adopted in 1990 by the Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR, was “contradictory” in nature and expressed a “collective patriotism” that the Soviet Union instilled in Armenians since the 1950s against the backdrop of the Cold War.

“The model of patriotism that the Soviet Union had formed for us Armenians expressed the southwestern direction of the ambitions of the USSR, a state that had won the Second World War and entered into conflict with the North Atlantic Alliance. On the other hand, this model was called upon to ensure the export of patriotic perceptions existing in the Armenian SSR from the territory of the republic to prevent its local expression,” Pashinyan writes.

He writes that the independence declaration, “expressed the collective mood of the political and intellectual elite operating in Armenia at the time of its adoption, bore the stamp of the Karabakh movement that had begun just two years earlier.”

Pashinyan argues that this ‘instilled ideology’ led to the Karabakh Movement” that ultimately threatened the independence of the Republic of Armenia “because a country with a surrounding conflict context cannot build real independence.”

“A complete and comprehensive analysis of the information and reality available to me in the position of Prime Minister has brought me to the unshakable conviction that we should not continue the Karabakh Movement, as it means the abolition of the independence of the Republic of Armenia,” Pashinyan writes.

Here, readers should note that on August 18, Pashinyan called on displaced Artsakh Armenians to relinquish any hope of returning to their homeland, labelling such aspirations as unrealistic.

Pashinyan then concludes by arguing that he and his administration did not make any concessions to Azerbaijan prior to the disastrous September 2020 Artsakh War, because by doing so “all the threats and dependencies we faced would have increased, would have increased disproportionately, leading to the loss of Armenia’s independence and statehood.”

“We adopted a strategy to preserve Armenia’s independence and make that independence a reality, and the expression of that strategy is the ideology of the Real Armenia, under which conditions peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan became possible, under which conditions a real dialogue with Turkey became possible, under which conditions our relations with Georgia and the Islamic Republic of Iran should deepen, under which conditions we become a real and interesting partner for the world,” Pashinyan writes.