Balasanian was detained late last week while reportedly attempting to stop police officers from searching his family’s home in the Karabakh town of Askeran. His son, the main target of the police raid, and brother were also taken into custody. They both were freed the following day.
Balasanian remained under arrest, with law-enforcement authorities pressing a string of charges against him. Despite the indictment, a local court ordered them to free him on Monday.
Balasanian’s lawyer, Rafael Martirosian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday that his client is accused of attacking the policemen, illegally keeping weapons, ammunition and drugs in his home and embezzling public property.
Balasanian denies the accusations and has come up, according to Martirosian, with “weighty arguments” disproving them.
No details of the embezzlement charge have been made public so far. Karabakh prosecutors have only shed light on a separate case opened against Balasanian’s son, who too denies any wrongdoing. They claim that he misused a 74 million-dram ($190,000) state loan provided for an agribusiness project.
Vitaly Balasanian, 64, was a prominent Karabakh Armenian commander during the 1991-1994 war with Azerbaijan. He became a vocal critic of Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian after the latter swept to power in 2018. The retired general was also a major opposition candidate in Karabakh’s last presidential election held several months before the outbreak of the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
Balasanian was appointed as secretary of Karabakh’s security council in the wake of the six-week war. In that capacity, he regularly negotiated with the commanders of Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in the region as well as Azerbaijani officials on security and humanitarian issues.
Arayik Harutiunian, the Karabakh president, sacked Balasanian in January one month after Azerbaijan blocked commercial traffic through the only road connecting Karabakh to Armenia. Some opposition figures in Stepanakert have described the criminal case against the prominent general as politically motivated. But Balasanian himself has made no such claims so far.