On April 13, the Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan stated at the Parliament that the international community expects Armenia to lower the status bar of Nagorno Karabakh.

"Today, the international community is again telling us to slightly lower our bar on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, and greater international consolidation around Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh will be ensured," he said. "Otherwise, the international community says, "please do not put your hopes in us, not because we do not want to help you, but because we cannot help you."

His words were perceived as a message to give up Nagorno-Karabakh. The next day, the de-facto Nagorno-Karabakh Parliament responded to him, issuing a statement claiming  that “the current legal status of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh was established through the expression of the will of its people."

“Any negotiation process between Armenia and Azerbaijan with a "peace" agenda, involving the forcible inclusion of Nagorno-Karabakh into Azerbaijan, as well as the signing of the document resulting from this, undermines not only the statehood of Nagorno-Karabakh but also the inalienable right of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their historical homeland," said the statement.

The statement, which was signed by all the parties in the de-facto Parliament, demanded the authorities of Armenia abandon its “destructive position” concerning the region's status. "No government has the right to agree with a status unacceptable for Nagorno-Karabakh on the pretext of "peace" as well as lower the bar of the internationally recognized right of a nation to self-determination in the negotiation process," said the statement.

“There is one red line, which is also unfortunately soaked in the blood of our children, and that is an absolute unacceptability of any status within Azerbaijan," told David Babayan, the head of the de-facto Nagorno-Karabakh MFA. “This is a consolidated decision of the entire Nagorno-Karabakh, both the population and the authorities, the entire political system, regardless of the political affiliation of the party."

The Armenian leadership demonstrated muted reaction to the statement issued by the de-facto Nagorno-Karabakh Parliament, which indicated the growing tension between the sides.

Metaksya Hakobyan, a member of the “Justice” faction of the local Nagorno-Karabakh Parliament, said that Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh have no current cooperation, and Nagorno-Karabakh is withdrawn from any process regarding its issue.

“We had friendly negotiations with the Armenian leaderships for 30 years with all three ex-Presidents. We agreed on every detail of the negotiation process and aligned our approaches without conflict. Later they (the Armenian government) introduced these results to the OSCE Minsk Group", she said.

After taking office, Pashinyan declared that he was starting the negotiation process from scratch.

"At that moment, it was already obvious that Nagorno Karabakh was out of the process, and Pashinyan had his vision on the future of Nagorno Karabakh, which he did not share with any of us, said Hakobyan. There are no negotiations between us, not even inter-consultative cooperation, no relations between ministers at all, or between the Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh Foreign Ministers”.

People in Nagorno-Karabakh believe that Pashinyan’s claim to lower the status of Karabakh is nothing more than recognizing Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan.

A resident in Stepanakert said that Armenia betrayed Nagorno-Karabakh. "When have you ever before heard that an Armenian MP would tell that Karabakh can be part of Azerbaijan? - said a 35-year-old resident on the condition of anonymity. Tell this to a man whose brother was brutally murdered in this war, that now he has to live with his brother's murders in Azerbaijan".

The resident’s comment concerned a resonant statement that the MP Vigen Khachatryan from Pashinyan’s ruling Civil Contract faction made in the Parliament of Armenia on April 14. Khachatryan suggested that it was wrong to believe that Nagorno-Karabakh would not be able to exist in Azerbaijan.

"Back in 1996, President Levon Ter-Petrosyan put forward the idea that the forcible subordination of one nation to another is unacceptable for us. The idea was that Karabakh had no future as part of Azerbaijan. Years have passed, and today we can say that, in my opinion, it was wrong," told Khachatryan.

Nagorno-Karabakh's de-facto government and Parliament addressed the Armenian Prime Minister with the questions to explain to them what 'the lowering of the bar on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh means.

"So far, we have not received answers to these questions," said Davit Melkumyan, an MP of the Democratic Party of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Meanwhile, on May 22, Pashinyan met Aliev in Brussels through the mediation of the President of the European Council, Charles Michel. The statement that they issued in the result of the meeting for the first time in the history of the whole negotiations did not mention the status of Nagorno Karabakh but instead mentioned the security of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh.

The absence of the region's status in the statement of the EU high-rank official increased the feeling of insecurity in Nagorno-Karabakh, which serves as proof that the Armenian leader is incapable of defending the Armenian position in Karabakh.

Moreover, during the IX Global Baku Forum on "Threats to the Global Order" in June, Ilham Aliev assumed that the Azerbaijanis had the right to demand the status for the Western Zangezur.

“If Armenia will try to demand status for Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, why shouldn’t Azerbaijanis demand status for themselves in Western Zangezur?" said Aliev.

By this, Aliev meant the events of the Civil War, when newly founded Armenian and Azerbaijan states fought just for this region during a short period of their independence from 1918 till 1920. For Armenia, it was critically important because of the access to the Iranian border, and for Azerbaijan because of the land corridor to Nakhichevan and Turkey. After the arrival of the Bolsheviks, this territory remained within Soviet Armenia, while Nagorno-Karabakh was passed to Soviet Azerbaijan.

Aliev also claimed that both Lachin and Zangezur corridors should be provided to establish relations with Armenia. “If we are not provided with this way of communication, it will be difficult to talk about peace, and all efforts of Azerbaijan to establish coexistence and normal neighborly relations with Armenia will fail," he said.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, in an interview with Al Jazeera TV channel, responded that the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh is in no way connected with the commission for the delimitation and demarcation of the border.

"We have established different formats of communication with Azerbaijan, one of which concerns the issue of delimitation," Pashinyan said. He added that the Nagorno-Karabakh issue is the most important for achieving regional peace. He also said that the wording "corridor” is unacceptable for Armenia. "For us, this is a red line. According to the trilateral agreement, there is one corridor in our region - Lachin, connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia," Pashinyan said.

While the exchange of critics between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan seemingly reminds the tug of war in the shade of war in Ukraine, the region's status remains an open question. 

"No one has the mandate to discuss the status of Nagorno-Karabakh without the involvement of officials from Nagorno-Karabakh. No one has the right to speak for us and decide the fate of Karabakh without the Karabakh people”, said Melkumyan.

Meanwhile, in another statement during the international conference "South Caucasus: Development and Cooperation" in Baku in April, Ilham Aliyev made a statement that implied that Baku and Stepanakert are negotiating.

“We receive very positive signals from the Armenians in Karabakh. We consider the Armenians living in Karabakh to be our citizens. We hope that they, too, will soon understand that, as citizens of Azerbaijan, they will have all the rights and freedoms, and their security will be ensured”, said Aliev.

However, in Stepanakert, people deny the possibility of any communication format between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan, despite the fact that there is no absolute trust in Araik Harutyunyan, as a former protege of Pashinyan.

Arthur Harutyunyan, a pro-governmental Free Homeland party of the de-facto Nagorno-Karabakh Parliament, excluded any possible agreement between the leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia to give up the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

"There is not a single Armenian in Karabakh who believes that Karabakh can be a part of Azerbaijan," assured Harutyunyan.

The MP said that the peace treaty signed on the terms of Azerbaijan could not lead to peace.

"By peace, Azerbaijan means that de-jure and de-facto Nagorno-Karabakh will be a part of Azerbaijan; however, if the status of Nagorno Karabakh is not included in the principles, then there will be no peace," he said.

Another parliamentarian in Nagorno-Karabakh, Vahram Balayan, the head of the Committee on Foreign Relations, recalls the historical memory as the obstacle to living together.

“Aliev wishes to show there is no problem at all, that we can live together, that they are ready to provide us with benefits, make investments, and supply gas and electricity. However, in reality, they are doing the opposite. They damaged the gas pipeline in February and left the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh without heat for two months, left children to freeze, and their snipers shot a tractor driver to death. They killed a worker in a garden or at construction premises. They occupied recently strategic places in Karabakh and killed three people shooting from drones."

The MP believes Pashinyan has no mandate to decide the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh because the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh did not vote for him and did not elect him.

“He (Pashinyan) may speak on behalf of Armenia and negotiate with Turkey and Azerbaijan, yet it is only the priority of the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities to conduct negotiations on its issues," said Balayan.

Meanwhile, in Yerevan, the opposition has been sporadically protesting for three months, demanding Nikol Pashinyan resign and calling him a traitor. The mobilization of opposition, or as they call it 'disobedience acts,' has mainly come as a reaction to Pashinyan's statement on the need to “lower the bar on the status of Nagorno Karabakh," but also after Pashinyan confessed that he could have prevented the war.

"Yes, we could have prevented the war if I surrendered (the territories in Nagorno-Karabakh); as a result, we would have had the same situation, but of course, without casualties and surrender. I became the author of decisions that led to thousands of victims", said Nikol Pashinyan at the Parliament on April 13. He said that for a number of reasons, he could not persuade himself to talk about this with the people.

Pashinyan did not explain the reasons that prevented him from not going to the war, which could have saved the lives of thousands of people, as he confessed. However, the fact that he could do so outraged both the opposition and the relatives of the killed soldiers. Pashinyan’s statement has been critically discussed in the light of Pashinyan’s refusal to stop the war, although the General Staff, on the fourth day of hostilities, presented him with a report which predicted that the war would be lost. Despite the information, which clearly showed the gravity of the situation on the war field, Pashinyan meanwhile declined Russian President Vladimir Putin's offer to stop the war on October 19.

The opposition believes that if Pashinyan had agreed, he could have saved thousands of lives.

"Armenia must have pro-Armenian authorities who can resolve the conflict not in favor of Nagorno-Karabakh but fairly," said Metaksia Hakobyan.

Oksana Musaelyan is a reporter based in Yerevan. She is also a founder of Refugee Voice Advocacy and Rights Protection NGO in Armenia, and a finalist of the UK Alumni Award from Armenia for 2021-2022