The details of Pasinyan’s yesterday’s folly have been made public by the press service of the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan, which went on a round-the-clock schedule last night for the first time since the 44-day war. However, it is important to highlight a very significant aspect of this new military confrontation. It was not Armenian armed groups outlawed in the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeepers who attacked the Azerbaijani military positions. It was the regular army of Armenia.
However, it was Nikol Pashinyan’s speech in Vladivostok that acted as a prelude to the new bloody war. The Armenian prime minister effectively disavowed the previous agreements, burying the last hopes for the voluntary implementation of the “Moscow agreements” on the opening of a land corridor from Azerbaijan to the Nakhchivan exclave. Tensions mounted with each passing day, and the reassuring statements by Aliyev and Pashinyan following the Brussels meeting faded away after the surprise provocations on the conditional Azerbaijani-Armenian border.
The new spiral of tensions is somewhat reminiscent of the July 2020 crisis that preceded a large-scale war. Just like now, the bloody military confrontation broke out then not in Karabakh, but in Tovuz, an Azerbaijani district bordering Armenia. At that time, too, Azerbaijan was able to contain the situation as quickly as possible, to prevent regular Armenian troops from entering the strategically vital area of energy transit routes. Déjà vu. The same M.O., the same mentality, the same brazenness; the difference is if in July 2020 Pashinyan tried to put pressure on Azerbaijan by torpedoing all peaceful efforts to activate the “Karabakh process”, this time Yerevan is trying to close the “Zangezur corridor” issue by aggravating the military-political confrontation. The Armenian period has again turned into the Azerbaijani exclamation mark.
But Armenia came out of the Second Karabakh War exhausted, having completely lost its military capacity and infrastructure under the precision fire of Turkish and Israeli UAVs.
Overnight, the Azerbaijani Army established control over new strategic positions along the border with Armenia, consolidating its military advantage on the “conditional border”. After this preventive special operation in response to yet another sortie by Armenian troops, Azerbaijan left Pashinyan no chance to launch new attacks on Azerbaijan’s territory in Zangezur. The rug was pulled from under the shattered Armenian army.
The Azerbaijani Army has seized new heights, which will allow it to shift combat operations to the territory of Armenia in the event of a new sabotage in the future. The choice is Pashinyan’s. Azerbaijan has no territorial claims, and the special operation was strictly local in scale. It was a surgical strike. But it was powerful and relentless enough to destroy Armenia’s entire defense system in West Zangezur. The Armenian army was cut off from the routes to the positions of Azerbaijani border checkpoints. The Azerbaijani Army also took under its control all of the key points of the transport and communications system.
The next sortie is going to have even more tragic consequences.
According to preliminary information, the Armenian government’s new military gamble has resulted in great casualties: some 200 Armenian soldiers dead, hundreds wounded. The Armenian people are paying too high a price for the rule of their reckless government that has lost its mind and the grip of the last threads of control…
Elnur Eminogli
Translated from haqqin.az
