LONDON (Reuters) — Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan told Joseph Biden in a letter on Saturday that recognition of the genocide is a matter of security to Armenia after a war in Nagorno-Karabakh last year.

Biden said on Saturday that the 1915 massacres and forced deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide.

“The recognition of the genocide is a matter of truth, historical justice and security to the Republic of Armenia, especially in the light of the events that took place in our region last year”, Pashinyan said in a letter to Biden published on his website.

Baku said Biden’s statement was “misrepresenting the events that happened 100 years ago”. Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry in a statement on Saturday said:

The falsification of history, attempts to “rewrite history” and its use for political pressure are unacceptable.

If Pashinyan’s statement is obviously absurd, Baku’s reaction is no less inappropriate as it tries to deny the indisputable crime of a third state committed at a time when the state of Azerbaijan did not even exist and the whole Caucasus was part of the Russian Empire.