“Azerbaijan is pursuing several goals with the March 5 terrorist attack. It is the aborting of further negotiations with the representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh and creating the necessary background for a new military provocation,” RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated at the government meeting. The fact that Azerbaijan once again raises the topic of disarmament of the Artsakh Defense Army gives reason to conclude that the information ground is being prepared for a new tension.
Ned Price, the Spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, testified about this, calling the situation “sensitive.” “It is a situation that is very close to violence, as we have seen recently in Nagorno-Karabakh.” The guest of the “Aravot” “Areresum” (“Confrontation”) program, Expert of the NA Standing Committee on Defense and Security, and Colonel of the reserve army Artsrun Hovhannisyan agreed that Armenia and Azerbaijan are on the verge of another tension.
“Yes, and we won’t say anything surprising or new here. In the last six months, the special services of the leading states, diplomatic representatives, and research centers have published about 15 studies that the escalation is very close. Why does everyone have this prediction? Because Azerbaijan has not reached its final goal and taking advantage of the fact that the world is in a mixed situation at the moment, and it has a technical advantage, which was formed after the 44-day war period, it will naturally try to use it, because maybe in a year it will not have that chance anymore. It would not be very reasonable for anyone not to try to use that moment if they were in Aliyev’s place. And it would be foolish to immediately go into combat without creating appropriate preconditions, without using semi-soft-semi-hard hybrid methods.”
The other program guest, Robert Ghevondyan, an expert of the Security Policy Research Center, Candidate of Political Sciences, objected. “I disagree that we are very close to escalation because the international community does not need a new hot spot. Moreover, the dramatic fears in Russian circles that a second front could be opened either in Georgia or Artsakh… Tension, yes; provocations, yes; small, local clashes, yes, but I underestimate the possibility of large-scale escalation simply because this requires the agreement of the main power centers, but Aliyev cannot get such an agreement under the current conditions of the world.”
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Artsrun Hovhannisyan reacted: “Of course, I’m not that pessimistic. But it’s better to be pessimistic and be wrong about the extent to which tensions will escalate into a full-scale war. From the point of view of political science patterns, yes, I agree that if there is no such agreement with the world’s strongmen, there cannot be a large-scale war; it is like that all over the world.”
In the meantime, let’s note that both program participants answered positively to the question that they assumed there was such an agreement in the case of the 44-day war. “It doesn’t exist today,” continued Artsrun Hovhannisyan, “and I think it can’t exist.”
And not only with the important centers, but it will be challenging to reach an agreement with other centers because no matter how much he wants to accumulate weapons, war has always been and remains a continuation or consequence of major political activities. But even those small ones, which we consider risky and which are also talked about in Washington, as you can see, are not so small. What losses did we have due to the operations of September 2022: human and territorial? And unfortunately, their technical advantage over us is pretty tangible and dangerous today.” “It was proved during September 2022 that they cannot implement without this agreement,” Robert Ghevondyan responded. “Because we know the calls to Baku and what happened after those calls.”
The entire conversation is in the video
Anna ISRAYELYAN
