Azatutyun.am. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday again defended his handling of the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, effectively shifting blame for its outcome onto Armenia’s top military brass.
Pashinyan admitted that he could have stopped the war in Nagorno-Karabakh three weeks before the Armenian-Armenian ceasefire brokered by Russia on November 9, 2020. He claimed that he rejected an earlier truce accord because it was even less favorable for the Armenian side.
Pashinyan made the comments as he publicly testified before an ad hoc commission of the Armenian parliament amid continuing statements by opposition politicians and other critics holding him primarily responsible for Azerbaijan’s victory in the six-week war that left at least 3,800 Armenian soldiers dead.
The commission, boycotted by opposition lawmakers, was set up last year with the stated aim of examining the causes of Armenia’s defeat, assessing the Armenian government’s and military’s actions and looking into what had been done for national defense before the hostilities. It has since questioned dozens of current and former government officials as well as military officers. All of them except Pashinyan testified behind the closed doors.
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In a joint statement released on Monday, the two opposition alliances represented in the National Assembly described Pashinyan’s upcoming testimony as a political “show” which they said is aimed at whitewashing his wartime incompetence and disastrous decision making.
Opposition leaders have said, among other things, that the Armenian side would have lost less territory and suffered fewer casualties had Pashinyan agreed to Azerbaijan’s terms of a ceasefire communicated through Moscow on October 19-20, 2020.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made similar claims on November 17, 2020 one week after the ceasefire brokered by him stopped the hostilities. Putin said that under the October 20 deal proposed by him and accepted by Baku, the Armenian side would have retained control over the strategic Karabakh town of Shushi (Shusha) in return for agreeing to the return of Azerbaijanis who had lived there.
Pashinyan again claimed on Tuesday that the return of the Azerbaijani refugees would have restored Azerbaijani control of Shushi because “they were supposed to have a separate road connecting Shushi to Azerbaijan.”
“This means without exaggeration that it was about handing over Shushi to Azerbaijan,” he told the panel comprising only members of his Civil Contract party.
Pashinyan further declared that the October 2020 deal rejected by him also called for an extraterritorial corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Armenia’s Syunik province.
Putin did not mention such a provision in his November 2020 interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel.
“Prime Minister Pashinyan told me openly that he viewed [the return of Azerbaijanis to Shushi] as a threat to the interests of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said at the time. “I do not quite understand the essence of this hypothetical threat. I mean, it was about the return of civilians to their homes, while the Armenian side was to have retained control over this section of Nagorno-Karabakh, including Shusha.”
Shushi was captured by Azerbaijani forces three days before the subsequent truce agreement halted the war. Azerbaijan agreed to stop its military operations in return for an Armenian pledge to withdraw from three districts around Karabakh. Baku regained control over four other districts, which had been occupied by Karabakh Armenian forces in the early 1990s, during the 2020 war.
Pashinyan appeared to blame the Armenian army’s General Staff for the fall of Shushi, saying that it falsely denied reports about Azerbaijani troops closing in on the Karabakh town overlooking Stepanakert. He said he was taken aback when the then General Staff chief, Onik Gasparyan, informed him on November 7, 2020 that it was captured by Azerbaijani forces.
“This was tough news for me because in all my conversations, instructions, orders, consultations, I had said that Shushi should be kept and I had received assurances that it will be kept,” he said.
Gasparian appeared before the parliamentary commission last month. His long testimony has not been publicized.
The army top brass led by Gasparian accused Pashinyan of incompetence and demanded his government’s resignation in a February 2021 statement. Pashinyan rejected the demand as a coup attempt before sacking the general.
