Tonoyan appeared before an ad hoc parliamentary commission tasked with examining the causes of Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. The two opposition blocs represented in the National Assembly boycott the work of the commission, saying that it was set up last year to whitewash Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s wartime incompetence and disastrous decision making.
Tonoyan called for an end to the opposition boycott in his opening remarks accessible to media. He also said that his decision to testify before the panel made up of Pashinian’s political allies should not be construed by the opposition as a sign that he has cut a “deal” with the Armenian government.
Gegham Manukian, a lawmaker representing the main opposition Hayastan alliance, was quick to reject his appeal. “We continue to insist that Nikol Pashinian and his regime cannot impartially examine their own actions,” Manukian wrote on Facebook
Manukian noted that Tonoyan criticized the opposition for trying to oust Pashinian in the immediate aftermath of the six-week war stopped by a Russian-brokered ceasefire. At the same time, he described the ex-minister as a government “hostage.”
Over the past year, the commission has questioned dozens of current and former government officials, including Pashinian, as well as military officers. Testifying before it in June, the prime minister again defended his handling of the 2020 war and effectively shifted blame for its outcome onto Armenia’s top military brass. Onik Gasparian, the wartime army chief of staff, disputed some of his claims.
Tonoyan confirmed Gasparian’s earlier assertion that two days after the outbreak of large-scale hostilities in September 2020 the latter warned the country’s political leadership to stop them because the Armenian side is headed for defeat. He also said that Turkey’s direct military intervention in the war proved decisive for Azerbaijan’s victory. That intervention, he said, was unexpected for the Armenian military which had calculated that it could “fight back Azerbaijani aggression.”
“We had not calculated that the Turkish armed forces could appear only 25-45 kilometers away from the Artsakh theater of war and carry out flights there,” added Tonoyan.
Tonoyan was sacked as defense minister in the wake of the war and arrested in 2021 in a criminal investigation into alleged supplies of faulty ammunition to the Armenian Air Force. He, two army generals and an arms dealer went on trial in 2022. They all deny fraud and embezzlement charges leveled against them.