By Hrant Gadarigian

Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan, in a statement today celebrating the thirty-third anniversary of the country’s independence from the Soviet Union, stressed that his administration’s peace agenda is the prime guarantor of Armenia’s independence.

“And now, on the 33rd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I want to emphasize that the peace agenda adopted by our government is the independence agenda, because if we have peace, we will have independence. As long as we do not have peace, the ghost of the USSR will hover in our sky, in the sky of our region,” the statement reads.

Pashinyan, here, doesn’t elaborate what he means by “the ghost of the USSR”, leaving it to readers to make their own assumptions.

Here’s another passage of Pashinyan’s statement:

“With the Declaration of Independence, we declared the path to leave the Soviet Union, but we also closed all our ways to leave the Soviet Union. With the Declaration of Independence adopted at the end of the 20th century, we adopted a formula that had already led us to the loss of independence at the beginning of the 20th century.”

This too is hard to decipher.

Pashinyan, referring to his “peace agenda”, is naturally talking about his administration’s stated policy of reaching a peace deal with neighboring Azerbaijan, a process that’s hit several roadblocks despite a recent flurry of Yerevan-Baku talks organized by the European Union, Washington DC and Moscow.