ArmInfo. The territory of the Republic of Armenia of 29,800 square kilometers is a rounded figure. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan announced at a press conference on March 12.
The Prime Minister first called at this stage not to reveal too many details about what is happening at the negotiating table, because "the environment in the negotiation room is already not very positive one anyway, and comments could reduce the existing potential."
"I will tell you about one episode that concerns 29,800 square kilometers. When the negotiations brought up the need to recognize each other's territorial integrity, Azerbaijan stated that it recognizes the territorial integrity of Armenia and has no territorial claims. Why is this conversation going on? For one simple reason: at the negotiations in Brussels, the question arose, what does Azerbaijan mean by the territorial integrity of Armenia? What does Armenia mean when talking about the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan? During the course of this discussion, the conversation developed to the point that there was probably objective data, and it was necessary to refer to this data", said Pashinyan. It was there that the idea arose to base it on the figure recorded in the latest edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia. According to him, the data was transferred to the President of the Council of the EU, and he published it. Then it turned out that the numbers on the title page of the encyclopedia were rounded, and a different figure was indicated in the text. In particular, the Azerbaijani side drew our attention to the fact that on the websites of a number of government bodies of Armenia, the territory of Armenia is indicated as less than 29,800 square kilometers - about 29,743, the same applies to Azerbaijan, the figure is rounded. It was precisely because of the discussions on the issue of these figures that a certain tension arose," said the Prime Minister of Armenia.
Earlier Pashinyan has repeatedly stated that Armenia recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan of 86.6 thousand sq. km. At the same time, Armenia expects Azerbaijan to confirm the recognition of Armenia's territorial integrity within the territory of 29.8 thousand sq. km. and border delimitation based on the latest maps of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces.