Pashinyan is betraying not only Armenia’s past but also its future, former Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian has said.
“Every nation carries the burden of its history. It shapes its identity, guides its diplomacy, and lays the foundation for future generations.
When a leader deliberately erases parts of that history to justify his own failures, he betrays not only his country’s past but also its future. This is exactly what Nikol Pashinyan is doing. By rewriting Armenian history, he is justifying his political failures and offering the nation only surrender and defeatism.
Pashinyan has declared that the Real Armenia will be the central idea of his 2026 election campaign.
He expects the Armenian people to unite around a vision that demands forgetting their own past, abandoning their displaced compatriots, and accepting Armenia as a humiliated and demoralized state. He insists that Armenia should accept its current borders, with possible further losses, and forget everything else. This is what he presents as pragmatism, but in reality it is nothing more than an escape from his own failures in diplomacy and governance. His Real Armenia doctrine is about surrender.
By erasing Artsakh from the national consciousness, Pashinyan is trying to legitimize its people and his inability to defend their right to self-determination. However, history shows that such self-imposed Amnesia does not bring peace, only more concessions. A leader who repeatedly abandons the fundamental rights of his own people does not build security; he creates the basis for further demands.
The Azerbaijani regime will not be satisfied with Artsakh.
Pashinyan’s continued retreat gives everyone whowho seek to further weaken Armenia. The more he erases history, the more he gives Armenia’s opponents a reason to demand more. The entire nation, especially the opposition, must realize that this is Pashinyan’s Achilles’ heel.
His vision is not one of national revival or pragmatic statehood. it is a vision of incompetence, failure, and the “legitimization” of Armenia’s decline. The idea that Armenia should accept its current state as its only possible future is not only uninspiring, it is downright dangerous.
It sends a signal to the world that Armenia will no longer fight for its interests, defend its historical rights, or even respect the suffering of its own people.
No serious nation simply forgets its lost territories. Greece never erased the memory of Constantinople.
Poland continues to commemorate Lviv.
Serbia, despite the loss of Kosovo, still considers it part of its historical narrative. The Russo-Ukrainian war will probably be resolved through harsh territorial compromises, but even in such a scenario, Ukraine will never erase the lost territories from its historical consciousness.
Why should Armenia be different? We need to be clear: there is a difference between active territorial claims and historical between truth, peaceful negotiations, and the erasure of identity. But Pashinyan’s defeatist rhetoric serves only his own political survival.
He is redefining history not out of necessity but out of convenience, because accepting the truth would mean accepting one’s own responsibility for the disasters that have befallen him under his rule.
The Armenian people must not allow the Real Armenia to become an excuse for Pashinyan’s failures.
This slogan must be turned against him, revealing it for what it really is: a symbol of incompetence,"An empty justification for defeatism and betrayal of Armenia's dignity," Oskanian noted.
