Yerevan /Mediamax/. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan gave an extensive interview to Public Radio’s “Safe Environment” program.

Here are some excerpts from the interview (subtitles are ours - Mediamax).

Combat-ready army and legitimate goals

It is the legitimate right of every country to have a strong and combat-ready army.

But this issue needs further discussion, because if you have a strong and combat-ready army to achieve legitimate goals, no one can tell you why you are strengthening your army. If you set a task, a goal, the legitimacy of which can be questioned by the external environment and internationally, many problems arise here.

Which is the territorial integrity of our country?

The territorial integrity of our country is the identical territorial integrity of the territory of the Armenian SSR. And now, when we say that we are strengthening our army to ensure the security of this territory, no one can say - why are you doing this?

And if we define the issue of strengthening the army in the following way – we are strengthening it in order, for example, to restore historical justice – a very simple question arises: why should others allow this army to become stronger, conditionally speaking, for resolving the issue of historical justice.

About the Declaration of Independence

What are the provisions of the Declaration? There are three cornerstone provisions. One is historical justice, the other is the wishes of the Armenian people, and the third is the reunification decisions of the Nagorno-Karabakh National Council and the Supreme Council of Armenia.

We always look from Azerbaijan’s point of view, but why don’t we consider how our other neighbors perceive it? How do they perceive when we say - we are creating a state to restore historical justice? What does it mean to restore historical justice?

We constantly ask: how does Azerbaijan perceive, how does Turkey perceive? But why don’t we ask: how does Georgia perceive? Why don’t we ask ourselves why Georgia has boosted relations in defense sector with Azerbaijan and Turkey and not with Armenia? Could this have anything to do with the messages that we have sent, that we have laid out as a basis of our state?

We really need to settle our relations with the Declaration today. Should our state policy be based on the decision to reunify Karabakh and Armenia?

This is a matter of political choice. If yes, this means we will never achieve peace. Moreover, this means that we will have a war now, because the economy is growing well, and obviously everyone sees that we are spending very serious resources on the transformation of the army. In other words, we declare that now we are strengthening the army and let’s implement the provisions of our Declaration. If we say this, what does this mean? This means that our neighbors will form an alliance to destroy us, because we have declared that at least we have a problem with them.