RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan presented details of the negotiations with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
According to him, it was said that we should recognize each other’s territorial integrity. However, Azerbaijan declares that it recognizes the territorial integrity of Armenia and has no territorial claims.
“Why does this conversation continue? For a simple reason, the question arose in the Brussels negotiation room about what Azerbaijan means by the territorial integrity of the Republic of Armenia. And what does RA mean by territorial integrity of Azerbaijan? This conversation developed to the point that perhaps there are objective data, and it is necessary to refer to them, in particular, to the data of that area,” he said.
According to the Prime Minister, the idea was considerable. “We said: very good, but what number?” Can you imagine the tension of the situation when the parties have to say that the territory of our country is this much? And there the idea arose that when we leave, we should announce the number fixed in the last edition of the Soviet encyclopedia. The first thing I did after leaving that room was to contact our colleagues and tell them to draw the data of Armenia and Azerbaijan from the latest Soviet encyclopedias and send them. I remembered that number: 29,800 km2, and the EU Council president was given that data, and he published that number.
I came back and published that number. Then, when we looked more closely, we saw that there are other numbers in the encyclopedia. 29,800 is written on the title page, then it turned out to be a rounded number, and there is another number in the text: 29,743 km2. Then the Azerbaijani side drew our attention to the fact that on the websites of a number of RA state bodies (I checked, that data was there for tens of years) the territory of RA indicated a different number, less than 29,800. When the RA government confirms its land balance from time to time, the other number is also written there, and 29,800 is a rounded number. The same applies to Azerbaijan.”
According to him, it is because of those numbers that tensions arose.
