ArmInfo. Many questions about the 44-day war remain open to the expert community. Former Deputy Minister of Defense of Armenia Artak Zakaryan stated this on January 26 at a press conference in Yerevan.
At the same time, he stated that the main reason for the defeat was the direct intervention and advice of an amateur - the "supreme commander-in-chief", completely incompetent in military-political issues. The f Former Deputy Minister expressed confidence that the country's armed forces could best solve the task set before them.
He denied claims that the army had failed to carry out its defensive mission properly for 26 years. "The Armed Forces of Armenia were faced with the task of modernizing weapons and acquiring modern military equipment every five years. And this was done taking into account the military-technical acquisitions of the enemy," Zakaryan said. He assured that over the past 26 years, the Armenian army has been provided with means equivalent to those of the Azerbaijani, but until the Azerbaijani Armed Forces acquired the Bayraktar drones.
The Armenian armed forces did not react to this properly, continuing their senseless actions to turn the army into a show. "Huge sums were spent on non-target expenses, namely, on the supply of food, strawberries, water, airplanes, and so on," Zakaryan said.
According to him, the current authorities of Armenia made it possible for the enemy to prepare even better for the planned war in conditions of military superiority.
As for the actual course of the war, the Former Deputy Minister believes that the first 22 days the Armenian army fully carried out its combat missions, but then, misleading the public and failing the replenishment of the Armed Forces, the authorities brought the Azerbaijani army to Shushi and ended the war by signing statement of surrender.
The former Deputy Minister also raised the issue of the responsibility of the former Defense Minister David Tonoyan, who recently spoke at a press conference. According to Zakaryan, the former defense minister should have been talking about something completely different.
"During the war, the Minister is directly responsible for the decisions that, in the end, predetermined the outcome of the war, which ended in defeat for us," Zakaryan said. He added that he expected from Tonoyan an assessment of the activities of the defense department for 2.5 years, an analysis of mistakes, comments on the impact of the negotiation process and political statements aimed at inciting war, but none of this happened.
According to Zakaryan, it has become very fashionable among government officials to make statements for self-defense.