“Moscow blocked their path and said, ‘Be patient, we will solve the problems soon,'” said the former deputy defense minister.
“I was at the northern border during the war. It was a full-blown air battle, a full-blown battle of drones. We were simply not ready for that,” Gagik Melkonyan, Civil Contract deputy and former deputy defense minister, said in an interview with Aravot, analyzing what we did for the army after the war to correct the shortcomings.
Gagik Melkonyan, as always, pointed out the mistakes of the previous authorities as to why the new authorities did not prepare properly for that war. “Azerbaijanis have been preparing for this war for more than 20 years. We used to hear Aliyev say, ‘I’m going to take it by force, I’m going to fight,’ but what did we do? We could not do diplomacy. We constantly deceived them. We said we would sign tomorrow, we would sign the next day… When the April events happened, they showed us that they are strong and can win at any time. Moscow blocked their path and said, ‘Be patient, we will solve the problems soo.’
How long after there was a movement of electricians, they said, wait, let’s get rid of the movement of electricians, then, the PPP regiment was captured, we said, wait, we will understand the capture of a PPP regiment, we have hostages, we have something, those hostages will be tortured, killed, I do not know what will happen. We can’t keep lying. We were only lying, we were not armed. They started arming 20 years ago and in those 20 years we had to arm ourselves and acquire long-range weapons and missiles. They say, what have you done in 3 years? What could be done in 3 years? They did not say how much this poor state could arm in 3 years. We had to arm ourselves every year and have modern weapons, but we did not have them. And they bring the weapons and say, why haven’t you won in the last 3 years? ”
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We reported that the former Minister of Defense Seyran Ohanyan says that a strategy has been developed to acquire drones, a procurement plan, but you have thrown it aside, and you have gone and bought expired missiles, Gagik Melkonyan responded, “Let them say when did they get the expired missiles? That was 10 years ago. Let them speak correctly, again. Yes, bring it to these authorities. Have these authorities lost? Our people have lost, these authorities have not lost, our state has lost.”
According to Melkonyan, we are not ready to love our homeland and fight for our homeland. They have made the people pro-government, they say we love Serzh Sargsyan, or Robert Kocharyan, or Nikol Pashinyan.
“Look, if we feel the danger of war, we take our children out of Armenia completely, then we say, ‘Let’s win.’ How will we win? If we run away from war. And it has been so for centuries, the rich boy did not fight, the rich boy did not fight in any war. This whole war has been on the poor, poor people, it has always been the people’s war.”
In response to our observation that the role of the authorities is to unite the people, to guide them to go to the army, to serve, not to run away, Melkonyan answered, “Of course I agree, we have many shortcomings. Now we are working. We think about the world army, the territorial defense, and in the border areas, we have armed detachments from the local population so that if necessary, the locals can take up arms and go to the border, not wait for forces to come from Yerevan, I do not know where. No. We are working on it now and our discussion will continue over the next two days so that a local living in the border regions should be able to carry weapons to defend their borders.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
