By Lia Avagyan
“The OSCE Minsk Group must be preserved at all costs. If the Minsk Group is dissolved now, it will be extremely difficult to establish a similar international format in the future,” Armenia’s second President Robert Kocharyan stated at a press conference today in Yerevan.
He called it “foolish” to take steps in a changing world that could result in an irreversible loss for the negotiation process.
Since the 2020 Karabakh war, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly demanded that the OSCE dissolve the Minsk Group meditation format.
In January 2025, following yet another threat of force from Azerbaijan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that Armenia might consider appealing the OSCE to dissolve the Minsk Group.
The OSCE Minsk Group has been the primary format for settling the Karabakh conflict since 1992. The group’s co-chairs—Russia, the United States, and France—mediated settlement plans for the conflict until the Second Karabakh War in 2020.
Kocharyan asserts that while peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is theoretically possible, the current negotiation framework fails to deliver a genuine and lasting resolution. According to him, one of the biggest challenges is that Armenia is negotiating with Azerbaijan without mediators. “No state will ultimately guarantee the peace agreement,” said Kocharyan.
The Lavrov Plan: a missed opportunity
Kocharyan claimed that in 2019 Pashinyan ignored an “exciting proposal” that was an acceptable offer and essentially declared that he was starting from scratch.
He was referring to a proposal made by Russia in 2019 regarding the settlement of the Karabakh issue, known as the “Lavrov Plan.”
Russia had put forward this framework for resolving the Karabakh conflict, known as the “Lavrov Plan” after the Russian Foreign Minister. The plan proposed returning five adjacent districts to Azerbaijan first, followed by the remaining two, without guarantees for a future referendum. It also envisioned the deployment of exclusively Russian peacekeepers along the administrative borders of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) and the corridor connecting Karabakh to Armenia, as well as the unblocking of transportation links.
Earlier, the 2007 Madrid Principles, presented by OSCE Minsk Group mediators, and the 2011 Kazan Plan, envisioned determining Nagorno-Karabakh’s final legal status through a referendum based on the ethnic composition of 1988. Under the Lavrov Plan, the timing of the referendum was left for an indefinite future. Azerbaijan insisted that any such referendum could not violate its constitution.
See: A recap of the 7 plans proposed for the settlement of the Karabakh conflict
Third President Serzh Sargsyan effectively did not accept the Lavrov Plan, refusing to do so after the 2016 Four-Day War in Karabakh. However, later—after losing power and following Armenia’s defeat in the Second Karabakh war—he stated that he had been ready to accept the Lavrov Plan.
During a session of the National Assembly last Wednesday, Nikol Pashinyan admitted for the first time that a document was on the negotiating table in 2019.
“What was put on the table in June 2019 was the result and summary of the negotiations conducted prior to me. The document’s heading clearly stated, ‘Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan,'” he said, emphasizing that he “has never been a President of Armenia.”
At today’s press conference, Robert Kocharyan expressed his belief that by rejecting that proposal and declaring that he was starting negotiations from “his own point,” Pashinyan had led the talks into a deadlock.
Kocharyan argued that at the time, there was an excellent opportunity to accept the co-chairs’ proposal and begin negotiations. Whether or not they would have yielded results was another question, but there was a chance to avoid war.
According to Kocharyan, Nikol Pashinyan continued to pursue a flawed policy even after Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war, which ultimately led to the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Kocharyan believes that Pashinyan’s gravest mistake was recognizing Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan during EU-mediated negotiations in Prague in October 2022.
“This was at a time when Russia was facing setbacks in Ukraine. With this decision, in my assessment, Russia’s mediation mandate was nullified. Russia was the mediator on the Karabakh issue between Armenia and Azerbaijan under the November 9 declaration,” Kocharyan noted.
In response to observations that Russia had not provided support to Armenia even before the Prague declaration, despite repeated attacks on Armenian sovereign territory by Azerbaijan—particularly in September 2022—Kocharyan stated, “No one can say that Armenia has ever officially approached Russia within the context of bilateral relations.”
“We ourselves discredited the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization). We were the ones who initiated criminal proceedings against [former CSTO Secretary General] Yuri Khachaturov. The overall attitude toward the CSTO was unacceptable,” he said.
Following the 2018 revolution in Armenia, a criminal case was initiated against then-CSTO Secretary General Yuri Khachaturov concerning the violent crackdown on protests in Yerevan after the 2008 presidential elections, when he served as the Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces.
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