Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian defended on Wednesday his decision to appoint an Armenian army general sacked following the 2016 war in Nagorno-Karabakh as his national security adviser.
The appointment of Major-General Arshak Karapetian, the former chief of Armenia’s military intelligence service, was announced on Monday. Pashinian’s office gave no reasons for it.
Karapetian and two other senior military officials were fired in April 2016 by then President Serzh Sarkisian more than three weeks after the outbreak of heavy fighting around Karabakh that nearly escalated into a full-scale Armenian-Azerbaijani war. About 80 Armenian soldiers and volunteers were killed during four-day hostilities stopped by a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Azerbaijani troops captured several heights at northern and southern sections of the Karabakh “line of contact” but failed to advance farther. According to independent sources in Baku, at least 92 Azerbaijani soldiers, many of them members of special forces, died in action.
Sarkisian said at the time that Armenian military intelligence failed to get “precise information” about the Azerbaijani offensive beforehand. “Had we had [such intelligence] the Azerbaijanis would have suffered much greater losses and failed to seize those several meters [of land,]” he told the Bloomberg news agency a few days before the high-profile sackings.
Pashinian’s decision to appoint one of the sacked military officials to his staff was therefore criticized by some commentators. The premier dismissed the criticism when he spoke to journalists in the town of Dilijan.
“Those who mention that Arshak Karapetian was fired by Serzh Sarkisian as a result of those events also say that Serzh Sarkisian is a just arbiter who made a just decision,” he said. “I have read dozens, if not hundreds, pages of secret materials about the four-day war and found nothing in those materials about the absence or lack of intelligence data.”
Pashinian expressed confidence that Karapetian will properly perform his new duties.
Pashinian’s chief of staff, Eduard Aghajanian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service earlier in the day that Karapetian will advise the prime minister on national security issues.