On November 26, the de facto president of occupied Abkhazia condemned Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statement on November 24 that Armenia “unequivocally and fully” supports “the unity, sovereignty, territorial integrity, independence and democracy of Georgia”. The Armenian Prime Minister said this while answering a question in a live broadcast on whether his country was ready to recognize Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region as Russia-occupied territories.
According to Ekho Kavkaza, Pashinyan further noted that Armenia’s votes in the UN have changed since 2019. Before 2019, Armenia had voted against the UN resolutions recognizing the right of Georgian internally displaced persons to return to their homes in occupied Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region. Since 2019, Armenia has abstained from voting.
In his statement, Aslan Bzhania blames the Armenian leadership’s statements on “Western influence,” claiming that Prime Minister Pashinyan’s recent statement “fundamentally contradicts the fact of sovereignty” of occupied Abkhazia.
“Today, the Armenian community in Abkhazia is represented in the central and local authorities, the Armenian language and culture are supported by the [ed. de facto] state, and the structures of the Armenian Apostolic Church function freely,” adding that “the Armenians in Abkhazia have everything that Nikol Pashinyan could not guarantee to the Armenians of Karabakh, who, as a result of his policies, faced the tragedy of the collapse of statehood and a mass exodus from their homeland.”
Bzhania called on the Armenian government to “abandon indoctrinated rhetoric and begin to take into account the actual state of affairs in the implementation of its foreign policy”.
Ethnic Armenian members of the so-called parliament of occupied Abkhazia, Ashot Minosyan, Galust Trapizonyan, Eric Rshtuni and Levon Galustyan, also reacted to Pashinyan’s statement, calling it “too cynical.” In their statement, the four representatives of the de facto legislature criticized the Armenian prime minister for “easily changing positions” and blamed him for the disappearance of Nagorno-Karabakh from the “political map of the world”.
“Unlike Pashinyan, there are no politicians in Abkhazia who would question the people’s choice and liquidate with a stroke of a pen a country that was conquered with the blood of sons and daughters,” the so-called deputies concluded.
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