Samvel Shahramanian, Nagorno-Karabakh’s former leader, on Thursday rejected Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s latest claims that the Karabakh Armenians did not fight back during Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive.
Shahramian also blamed Pashinian’s for the region’s resulting capture by Baku.
“It is thanks to [the Armenian authorities’] actions that the people of Artsakh are in such a situation today and the Armenian people lost Artsakh,” he told reporters.
Azerbaijan launched the offensive in Karabakh on September 19, 2023 nearly three years after a ceasefire deal brokered by Russia halted a six-week Armenian-Azerbaijani war. Its troops greatly outnumbered and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from Armenia.
After 24-hour hostilities, Karabakh’s leaders agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s more than 100,000 remaining residents to flee to Armenia. They maintain that this was the only way of guaranteeing the physical safety of the Karabakh Armenians.
At least 198 soldiers and 25 civilian residents of Karabakh were killed during the fighting. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry acknowledged roughly 200 combat deaths among its military personnel involved in the operation.
“These myths that [the Karabakh Armenians] fought to the end and so on are lies,” Pashinian claimed on March 26. “There was no such thing, they fled, they ran away.”
Shahramanian dismissed the claims as “nonsense,” saying that they are aimed at dividing the Armenian society and spreading “intolerance” towards the Karabakh refugees.
Pashinian and some of his political allies have made such allegations before. In particular, the premier said in June 2024 that Karabakh forces “did not fight” because the authorities in Stepanakert as well as the Armenian opposition wanted the region’s population to flee to Armenia to topple him.
Those statements provoked a storm of condemnation from Armenian opposition leaders and public figures as well as Karabakh refugees. One of those refugees, a young woman, held Pashinian responsible for the fall of Karabakh as he campaigned for Armenia’s upcoming parliamentary elections on Yerevan’s subway on March 22. The premier lost his temper, brandinf the Karabakh Armenian as “fugitives” and saying they have no moral right to denounce him. He later apologized for his outburst condemned by his detractors and even some sympathizers.
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