On June 15, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated in the National Assembly that his biggest mistake was trusting the army. In the investigative commission created to investigate the circumstances of the military operations unleashed on September 27, 2020, he also detailed: “For me, the opinion of the head of the General Staff was important.
Due to objective and subjective circumstances, I have believed and trusted the people in the position of the authority of the General Staff of the Armed Forces almost unconditionally, and the fact that they wear general’s shoulder straps is a huge advance of the presumption of trust for me. That has been a factor for a long time until that trust has been completely undermined, and the disruption is linked to specific episodes.
President of the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, political scientist Tigran Grigoryan, who worked in the Security Council during the period in question, told during the “Aravot” “Areresum” (“Confrontation”) program, “Actually, there is some truth in these claims. I have seen well the picture that existed before the war. The military presented quite an optimistic picture.”
He added, “Based on those reports, even other steps were taken; that is, they did not consider the Azerbaijani direction a priority and tried to strengthen security in different directions. Onik Gasparyan’s claim that he reported on the 4th day that the war should be stopped is also untrue.
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He spoke about it for the first time on October 19 during the session of the Security Council. But the whole point here is that a person or team even with minimal knowledge of security and foreign policy could have understood that these optimistic reports were inaccurate. Even people outside the system were talking about it. In my opinion, the political authorities did not even know about the weapons acquired by Azerbaijan in recent years, and they did not imagine the degree of that danger.
Nikol Pashinyan claims: “As a political authority, I have put a simple task before the army: tell me what you need, and you will have it. They said: Su-30 is needed, a state-of-the-art plane; I said, if you need it, you will have it. What else do you need? Do you need a title? You will have it. Do you need a medal? You will have it. Do you need money? You will have it. Do you need food? You will have it. Meanwhile, the former Chief of General Staff Onik Gasparyan testified in his statement: “We did not manage to implement the measures planned for the 2018-2024 modernization programs of the armed forces and the acquisition of weapons and military equipment, as a result of which we did not manage to bring the military power of the armed forces to the planned level. In other words, the war started under conditions that were not favorable for us.”
The other guest of the program, a senior researcher of the Caucasus Institute, political scientist Hrant Mikayelyan, answered the question of which one of these two claims seems more convincing, he said: “If we talk about the omissions in the field of the army, especially in 2018-2020, the conversation will last more than an hour… Almost nothing has been done from the purchase plan adopted in February 2018, which was not fully determined.”
He also listed examples of canceled purchases. “In the case of drones, he saw corruption risks. In the case of false targets, they had to buy a large number of fake targets from Poland; they also saw the risk of corruption, etc. The personnel regiments in Syunik were canceled.”
During the 44-day war, the representative of the Ministry of Defense, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, stated in an interview given by Public Television-H1. “After the events of July 2020, the head of the Security Council, Onik Gasparyan, presented a dream or, to put it bluntly, a definitive list of weapons and ammunition in the Security Council. If I am not mistaken, it is about 5 billion dollars or a little more or less. The economy of Armenia could not be allocated in 1 day, and it was not possible to realize it quickly.”
Hrant Mikayelyan said in response to the question։ In the end, did they have everything, or was the requested amount not allocated? “It is impossible for the army to have everything desired. Here the question is different: is the question technical in general or not? In my view, it is not the army that goes to war, but the whole state and we have seen that only the Ministry of Defense and even the staff of the Prime Minister or the Security Council were involved, but only parts of the state. But for example, until 2018, there were “Shunt” military exercises, which implied the involvement of the entire state apparatus during such crises. And it was canceled after 2018.”
He mentioned that there is a need for a severe study regarding purchases. “I was not there to know who had what needs and to what extent Pashinyan satisfied them. But the main problem cannot be the weapon; that is my profound conviction. The main problem is management, foreign relations, infrastructure, quick decision-making, and reaction systems. According to him, these problems, in most cases, concern Pashinyan himself.
Tigran Grigoryan also listed the problems and emphasized: “If we had an impartial investigative commission, they should have studied these issues. However, the problem is that all this is politicized. The authorities are trying to prove that they are 100 percent innocent. The previous authorities talk about what an ideal situation was there, and these came and ruined everything. The truth is, of course, in the middle.”
The entire conversation is in the video
Anna ISRAYELYAN
