“In his short term as the state minister [of Artsakh], Vardanyan had little time to accomplish anything. In all his interviews and statements he was tactful, not belligerent, did not promote any ideas of revanchism and spoke about Karabakh more from the point of view of the need to protect its Armenian population and heritage. I came to Stepanakert for the last time when Vardanyan had just been appointed. This was just weeks before the blockade and the closure of the Lachin corridor. Karabakh people have always been mistrustful of the aliens, and after losing the war they were even more withdrawn and gloomy. The last 40 years have taught them that people from the outside will turn out to be temporary at best, and at worst will abandon them at the worst possible moment, like the Soviet internal troops, like the Russian peacekeepers. Vardanyan’s arrival in Karabakh was viewed philosophically: “It can’t get any worse, but maybe he will succeed. And in those circumstances, as a state minister, nothing was expected of him. But Vardanyan made a breakthrough elsewhere. Probably never during the entire existence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic has any Karabakh politician – president or commander – been quoted by the world press as often as Vardanyan. He was a world-renowned speaker of a tiny region lost on the map. Apparently, this is what determined his place in Baku’s “black list”.