“In the South Caucasus, there was no country called Azerbaijan during the time of the Armenian king Tigran the Great,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at a panel discussion on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict together with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

Pashinyan said that historically, Armenians, Georgians, but not Azerbaijanis lived here.

The PM also added that the transfer of Karabakh to Azerbaijan was a personal initiative of Joseph Stalin.

“If President Aliyev wants to go so far into history, then want to remind him that when Armenian King Tigran the Great was negotiating with Pompey, a Roman military leader, there wasn’t any country in the South Caucasus named Azerbaijan. I can go even further and start from 400 BC, but I don’t think that it is the right way to go,” Armenian Prime Minister stressed.

To his part, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said: “Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan, this is the historical truth.”

 “In 1805 the Khan of Karabakh, Ibrahim Khalil, signed a treaty with the Russian general Tsitsianov. According to this treaty, Karabakh, as an independent country, became part of the Russian Empire. This agreement does not say anything about the Armenian population of Karabakh,” Aliyev said.