Armenia’s Investigative Committee indicted Lieutenant-General Jalal Harutiunian in September 2022 on two counts of “careless attitude towards military service” One of the accusations stemmed from an Armenian counteroffensive against advancing Azerbaijani forces launched on October 7, 2020 ten days after the outbreak of large-scale fighting. Its failure facilitated Azerbaijan’s subsequent victory in the six-week war.
The Investigative Committee said at the time that Harutiunian ordered two army units to launch an attack southeast of Karabakh despite lacking intelligence and the fact that they were greatly outnumbered by the enemy and had no air cover. It also blamed the general for poor coordination between the units which it said also contributed to the failure of the operation.
The committee confirmed on Wednesday that Harutiunian has been cleared of this charge. It said a prosecutor overseeing the criminal investigation made this decision based on the findings of a report submitted by unnamed military experts.
According to Harutiunian’s lawyer, Arsen Sardarian, the 11 “experienced” experts concluded in the 306-page report that the general acted competently during the botched counteroffensive. Sardarian declined to go into details, saying that he will hold a news conference soon.
Sardarian claimed in June that the counteroffensive in question was not necessarily a failure because the Karabakh and Armenian forces killed some 300 Azerbaijani soldiers and suffered only 20 casualties.
The lawyer also argued that the counteroffensive was authorized by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and the then chief of the Armenian army’s General Staff, Lieutenant-General Onik Gasparian. He said that if his client is indeed guilty of mishandling that operation then so are Pashinian and Gasparian.
Pashinian has denied Armenian opposition allegations that he is the one who ordered the October 2020 operation.
“That operation was proposed by a general and that proposal was deemed acceptable by a general and the possibility of putting that proposal into practice was assessed by a general,” he told lawmakers in 2021.
Harutiunian was not arrested pending investigation, unlike his successor Mikael Arzumanian, who is facing separate charges in Armenia stemming from the disastrous war. Arzumanian too denies them.
Opposition leaders maintain that Pashinian is primarily to blame for Armenia’s defeat in the war which left at least 3,800 Armenian soldiers dead. They claim that he ordered the criminal charges against Harutiunian, Arzumanian and other senior military officers to try to dodge responsibility. The premier has blamed the country’s former leaders for the outcome of the war stopped by a Russian-brokered ceasefire.