At a Yerevan press conference today, Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan announced that he is ready to hold discussions with the three former presidents of the country on the Karabakh issue if the need arises.

Pashinyan said that the government of Artsakh must take part in all settlement talks and that the issue cannot be successfully resolved without their input.

"There is talk that we have not managed to get Artsakh back to the negotiating table, just as we have not been able to return it in the last 22 years, when Artsakh was left out of the negotiations. For 22 years, the entire international community and the OSCE Minsk Group have been working in these conditions. There was a tacit consensus that Artsakh should not be at the negotiating table. However, we cannot adopt any decision on behalf of the elected representatives of Artsakh,” Pashinyan said.

When asked if his government would continue negotiations from where the government of Serzh Sargsyan left off, Pashinyan said that whatever principles agreed to by Sargsyan are not acceptable.

"We have said no because what we have inherited is not acceptable to us. We should not try to restrain ourselves so that we do not talk or listen around the negotiating table. There are different views on the settlement of the Karabakh issue. There’s the step by step and the package approach. As for any document, no new document was created after the revolution. We rejected the old document,” Pashinyan said.

He reiterated his view that any settlement must be acceptable to the peoples of Artsakh, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.