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"In general, we should re-evaluate our thirty years of independence," Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at a Q&A session in the parliament on Monday.

“We should assess how we have spent time, we should reconsider how we have used the past 2.5 years,” the premier said.

His comments came in response to a question of My Step faction MP Viktor Yengibaryan about the possibility for Armenia to emerge stronger after the major losses in over 40 days of the Artsakh war.

“We must find the answers to these questions. For thirty years we have lived by the following logic: “no war” and “not an inch of land for surrender to the enemy”. We have not even noticed that there is a contradiction between these two. We have to make a choice and focus on that choice. In the past two and a half years we made that choice, maybe we made a bad choice, maybe we did not understand that we would not be able to do enough work to make that choice. But I made that choice and I failed in that choice. I personally bear full responsibility for it. But how the failure to make a choice worked in the last thirty years ...

“Yes, today the public has a right to demand answers from me, but I also have a right to demand answers from many others. We have wasted our thirty years, maybe we have wasted 2.5 years, too, but 2.5 years are most certainly not thirty years,” he stated.

Speaking about the fall of the town of Shushi, Pashinyan stressed if it was so important why anything had not been done in the past thirty years to improve the town.

"Who sold Shushi? If they sold it, they sold it during the past 30 years, because Shushi was an unhappy and dull city. Did we need Shushi? If we needed it, why was it in that condition?” he asked.