The Republic of Armenia is more independent today than ever before: Pashinyan

RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wrote on his Facebook page:

"Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,

On August 23, 1991, the Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR adopted the Declaration of Independence of Armenia.

That document initiated the process of establishing our independent statehood, the Republic of Armenia. The Declaration, in essence, expressed the collective mood of the political and intellectual elite active in Armenia at the time of its adoption, bore the stamp of the Karabakh Movement which had begun just two years earlier and was reaching its peak, and was to predetermine the key characteristics of the newly forming independent Republic of Armenia.

And so it happened, because the key ideological provisions of the Declaration were conflict-oriented and expressed the model of our collective patriotism that had been instilled in us by the Soviet Union, drop by drop but consistently, since the 1950s, in the environment of the establishment of the Iron Curtain and the start of the Cold War.

That model of patriotism, which the Soviet Union had formed for us, the Armenians, expressed the south-western direction of the ambitions of that state, the USSR, which had won the Second World War and entered into conflict with the North Atlantic alliance. On the other hand, this model was intended to ensure the export of patriotic perceptions existing in the Armenian SSR from the territory of the republic, in order to prevent its local expression.

This ideology was instilled for decades through books, films, plays/theatrical performances, and it is our social-psychology formed in this way that led to the Karabakh Movement. We, all of us, were the bearers of that social-psychology, that social-psychology formed by the USSR was passed on to the generations formed in the Republic of Armenia in the 90s, and the deep and subconscious goal of that social-psychology was the strategic impossibility of the existence of an independent Armenian state, because a country with a constant conflictual subtext cannot build real independence.

Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,

The complete and comprehensive analysis of the information available and the reality in the position of Prime Minister brought me to the unwavering conviction that we should not continue the Karabakh Movement, as that means the abolition of the independence of the Republic of Armenia. Today I also want to answer a question that is perhaps the most important for understanding the history of the last 7 years.

After all, why until September 2020 did the Republic of Armenia, our Government, and I myself not make concessions, which was the only theoretical possibility to avoid the 44-day war. The key reason for this was that as a result of those concessions, all the threats and dependencies we had would have increased, they would have increased disproportionately, leading to the loss of Armenia's independence and statehood.

We adopted a strategy of preserving Armenia's independence and making that independence real, and the expression of that strategy is the ideology of Real Armenia, under the conditions of which peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan became possible, under the conditions of which real dialogue with Turkey became possible, under the conditions of which our relations with Georgia and the Islamic Republic of Iran should deepen, under the conditions of which we become a real and interesting partner for the world.

Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,

Our state, the Republic of Armenia, one of the key features of which is its internationally recognized 29,743 square kilometer sovereign territory, is the most important value that we have and that we have had in the last more than 500 years. And we must be guided by the interests of our state, and our state and its interests must be the foundation and axis of our patriotism, for the love of the creative people living in it, all of you.

We are going on this path and on that path, passing through hellish trials, we have reached a seemingly impossible milestone: the Republic of Armenia is today more independent than ever, more sovereign than ever, more of a state than ever, more prosperous than ever, more promising than ever, because it is peaceful. Peace is established and it must become an object of daily care and attention, it must become institutional.

August 2025 became the beginning of a peaceful and prosperous life for the Republic of Armenia.

I congratulate all of us on this occasion.

Glory to the martyrs and long live the Republic of Armenia," he wrote.