The ex-president of Armenia, one of the instigators of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict Serzh Sargsyan confirmed the facts of the war crimes committed by Yerevan against the civilian population of Azerbaijan during the Second Karabakh War, speaking during the interview published this week. Overall, this interview is part of the ongoing political campaign of the Karabakh clan "war party" of Sargsyan and Robert Kocharian against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, but it sheds light on last autumn's important events.
In October last year, Armenian troops launched medium-range ballistic missiles from Armenian territories at Azerbaijani cities and regions on a weekly basis, primarily at Ganja and Mingachevir. Dozens of people were killed in Ganja. The facts of these terrorist attacks were officially recorded, including by international organizations, but Yerevan continues to deny its involvement, simply ignoring the evidence.
When asked if he agrees that Armenia did not strike Azerbaijani non-military targets with heavy weapons, Serzh Sargsyan replied that in fact such strikes were delivered repeatedly. Without naming Pashinyan, the leader of the "war party" said: "Remember, one braggart said that he gave the order to destroy the Ganja airport. But in reality they attacked a residential city block in Ganja, which was the greatest stupidity, and I do not understand the actions of these people".
In the same way, Sargsyan acknowledged the fact that Armenian troops attacked Azerbaijani positions and settlements last July in the Tovuz region, stressing that Yerevan is guilty not only of provoking cross-border hostilities, but also of lying to Moscow, which was told that Azerbaijan attacked Armenia, although Russia perfectly saw the real situation. According to Sargsyan, it was the July battles that made the war inevitable.
At the same time, Sargsyan during the interview once again recalled why the people of Armenia expelled him from the prime minister's chair and removed from any kind of power in 2018 - he also spoke about how the command of the Karabakh occupiers should wage the Second Karabakh war, condemning Pashinyan not only for the beginning of active hostilities against Azerbaijan but also for insufficient cruelty.
First of all, the head of the "war party" stressed that Pashinyan should have given the order to strike the Azerbaijani troops on the territory of Azerbaijan with Iskander, while the latter did not dare to use this weapon until the very last moment and used it only once during the Shusha battles. "Iskander should have been used on the fourth or fifth day of the war, when Azerbaijan accumulated huge quantities of manpower and military equipment in Horadiz and other units," he said.
At the same time, Sargsyan noted that he would use the Iskanders as a means of terror and inflict devastating blows on the strategic international infrastructure passing through Azerbaijan. "I'm not saying that the first target should have been gas pipelines, an oil pipeline, but nevertheless. Why did we take this Iskander? Why did they bring it if we didn’t use it at the necessary moment?" the war criminal overthrown by the Armenian people said.
In addition, the ex-president of Armenia confirmed one more fact, denied by official Yerevan: the Azerbaijani army drove the invaders out of Shusha on November 5, while the occupation troops suffered heavy losses. "The capitulator wrote on November 9 that there are battles for Shusha, and Shusha was under the control of the Azerbaijani military by November 5. During the stubborn battles we had hundreds of victims, in many cases incomprehensible," Serzh Sargsyan noted.
Thus, on the one hand, the leader of the Karabakh occupiers exposed the lies of official Yerevan about the events of last year, however, on the other side, he showed himself and the people behind him as no less evil for Armenia and the South Caucasus than Pashinyan's team.
There is no reason to trust Sargsyan's words that he would not have allowed the war: during the years of his presidency, Armenia had already provoked a large-scale clash with Azerbaijan - the April battles for Karabakh in 2016; the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict came to a standstill under Serzh Sargsyan, already at the beginning of 2018 there were no formal grounds for dragging out the negotiations, and then Armenia managed to slow down the process only thanks to the "velvet revolution" and the replacement of the Karabakh clan with the power of the street movement leaders..
In fact, with the policy pursued by Serzh Sargsyan, the Second Karabakh War was just as inevitable as with Nikol Pashinyan's inconsistent and improvisational style - especially since Pashinyan de facto copied the tactics of his predecessors in the Karabakh direction. This interview is evidence proving the Armenian government's guilt in war crimes, but at the same time it cannot justify Sargsyan's won war crimes. Rather, it confirms that almost three years ago the people of Armenia made the right choice, depriving Serzh Sargsyan of power
