“The army has never been hungry, and our army’s soldiers have never chased after anything,” the former Minister of Defense and candidate on the Armenia alliance’s list, Seyran Ohanyan, told reporters in Goris in response to a statement made by Nikol Pashinyan on Monday regarding how people would throw candy at soldiers in the past, and soldiers would chase after and grab that candy. Alen Simonyan had also told a story while holding back tears about how soldiers were starving when he was serving, and he would secretly eat food his parents sent him in the graveyard. Seyran Ohanyan said that they could have asked the person in charge of the army logistics at the time, General Gagik Melkonyan, who is now included on the Civil Contract list. “I am sure that he can also prove that the army never went hungry,” Seyran Ohanyan said.
Recently, Nikol Pashinyan and other government representatives have been publishing data and finding parallels to work carried out in the army in the past, as well as military equipment that was obtained, claiming that they have done more during their three years in power than has been done over the past 27 years. Seyran Ohanyan considers such claims to be a form of manipulation, and he brought forth several counterarguments. Within this context, he remembered that in 2016, opposition deputy Nikol Pashinyan asked Minister of Defense Seyran Ohanyan to receive him after the April War. Ohanyan received him. Nikol Pashinyan has asked Seyran Ohanyan how the frontlines started to become intensively equipped after the Four-Day April War.
“I called the commander of the Defense Army in his presence, and I asked the commander how many kilometers the anti-tank reinforcements spanned. Six to seven kilometers out of 483 had been restored, and new positions were established,” Seyran Ohanyan said. He assured that it will be possible to re-equip and reorganize the army very quickly with a change of government. Aravot Daily also asked Ohanyan about the possibility of accepting military-technical assistance from France. Seyran Ohanyan said that he was not familiar with the details of the proposal, but there had never been a problem for multilateral military-technical cooperation in the Armenian Armed Forces.
Nelly Grigoryan
