PM Pashinyan Is Fully Responsible For Fighting a War With Obsolete Weapons

 

Military analysts and experts from a variety of armies with advanced methods of post war “Damage Assessment” (DA), were shocked by satellite images obtained from independent sources, and “drone strike” videos of Armenian artillery positions neutralized and Armenian tank crews blown to pieces while an impotent Armenian Air Defence Network failed to do anything significant to turn the tide of the Second Artsakh war all along the contact line of the military offensive campaign launched by Azerbaijan on Sept. 27, 2020.

All those familiar with the dismal performance of The Armenian Air Defence Network agree on one key fact: Armenia with the full awareness and direct involvement of the political establishment, headed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, purchased from The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan obsolete weapons, specifically 35 units of the 9k33 OSA (a.k.a. SAM-8) for the special price of $ 27 million.

On a visit in January 2020 to Unit “N” of the Ministry of Defense of Armenia, accompanied by Minister of Defense David Tonoyan and Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Artak Davtyan, PM Pashinyan twisted the facts and extolled the wisdom of the purchase at a bargain price of a useless air defense system, and the employment opportunities it will create for the domestic Armenian Military hardware producers, to upgrade the electronics of the radar system and breathe a new life into vehicles The Jordanian Army decided to sell as metal junk with a mass of approximately 17.5 tons each. 

 

Mr. Pashinyan during his visit to Unit N

We all know that by the time the Azebaijani offensive was launched on Sept. 27, 2020 The NKR Army had no modernized version of the obsolete OSA vehicles, and missiles that had passed a decade ago their intended “Shelf Life”, were diving into the ground a few hundred yards away from the launch vehicle or straying sideways. Many videos are available on YouTube , mostly intercepts from Russian Military Intelligence(GRU)  monitoring the developments in the multiple districts of the front, but one video (dated Nov. 2020) was released with a translation of the Armenian field commander radioing the following statement to Headquarters: 

“…that is why the enemy's drones were so dominant in our sky, one missile spits out right in front of us, another spits out to the side, this is our air defense. The question is - who bought us such military equipment?”

Who bought us such military equipment? A million dollar question involving intrigues,  cloak and dagger scenarios where reality is stranger than fiction, and smoke and mirror tricks adopted to protect an obscure  Armenian arms dealer controlling multiple offshore accounts, corrupt politicians, high ranking military procurement officers determined to whitewash the politicians who bestowed ranks, medals, and all sorts of perks to buy their silence.

At the center of the fiasco that claimed the lives of hundreds of Armenian/NKR soldiers is a shoddy character named David Galstyan, masquerading as a businessman, an advisor to the former defense minister David Tonoyan, and a close crony of PM Pashinyan who renewed his license to pursue arms deals on behalf of the Republic of Armenia.

One immediately wonders why a sovereign state like Armenia needs a broker/arm dealer, when any military hardware manufacturer cleared to sell to Armenia any weapon it produces can bargain directly with the Armenian Government or the Army’s Department of Procurement. The mystery becomes more obscure when we take into consideration the fact that 90% of Armenia’s weaponry is purchased from Russia, at the same preferential price the Russian manufacturer gives to The Russian Army. Needless to mention that the export price of any Russian weapon system is 40 to 50% more than the “domestic price”, or the “preferential price” given to Armenia as a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

This is where a group of Armenian politicians from the Old Guard era and the present government, noticed that there is a unique opportunity to apply a creative  “Entrepreneurial Spirit” to the existing military agreement between Russia and Armenia, and make money-not small changes but a huge fortune that can make all the actors involved very rich at the end of their political career.

And this is where the arms dealer David Galstyan plays a critical role to cover the trail of the lies he feeds the Russian side to generate an illegal wealth for himself and his buddies in the Armenian Government.

And this is how Mr. Galstyan schemed the Russians. Armed with a purchase order issued by The Armenian Government for 100 APV-armoured personnel carrier (example), Galstyan will direct 60 APVs to Armenia and sell the remaining 40 to Third World countries/developing countries that cannot deal directly with Russia due to restrictions of arms exports, imposed by The UN and other international bodies, to war ridden countries.

Through a series of offshore accounts Galstyan diluted the money trail, the profit he made, and the amounts he used to grease the palms of his Armenian friends who supplied the appropriate documents.

For a while everything worked well until Russian agents, active in a variety of war zones, noticed the presence of Russian manufactured military hardware that should not be in the possession of any local warring party without a valid transfer clearance from Russia. Based on serial numbers used on all the weapons Russia manufactures, a significant amount of weapons sold “Formally” to Armenia were directly linked to Mr. Galstyan illegal transfers.

In 2019, the Russian government unequivocally declared David Galstyan “Persona Non Grata” (PNG), and banned him from entering the Russian Federation for ten years. Though the PNG designation is used in international diplomacy to protect diplomats representing countries, in Galstyan’s case it meant that he can no longer represent or enjoy any form of protection from The Armenian Government, and he will be arrested by Russian authorities if he tries to enter The Russian Federation.

The Russian anger with Galstyan and his Armenian protectors reached a boiling point at the end of 2020. To save face with the Russians, in January 2021 the National Security Service of Armenia arrested and charged Mr. Galstyan with “money embezzlement on a specially large scale” connecting him to four criminal cases under investigation.

The blunders of PM Pashinyan and his former defense minister David Tonoyan did not start with the highly questionable and controversial association with an unscrupulous arms dealer who brokered behind the scenes the Jordanian deal.

Back in Nov. 2016 when Mr. Tonoyan was serving under the shadow of the old guard as the first Deputy Defense Minister, he declared to the Armenian media that the political leadership is engaged in an in-depth review of Armenia’s defense strategy and a blue print was under serious consideration for the development of the Armed Forces of The Republic, and accordingly “…the most modern weapons are planned to be purchased.”

How did Mr. Tonoyan modernize the Armenian Army? He compared apples to oranges and shaped the decision of what is or is not effective for a modern army. While Azerbaijan was making quantum leaps in acquiring foreign technology to improve the striking capabilities of its drones, Mr. Tonoyan turned down an Israeli offer to sell Armenia the same drones purchased by Azerbaijan. Why did he decline the Israeli offer? The following is his personal explanation: “We refused, because we did not see it necessary…a passenger bus could be damaged from a grenade launcher, there was no need to buy attack drones for it."  

The brilliant Armenian version of Klemens von Metternich, Mr. Tonoyan, assumed that Azerbaijan will exclusively use its drone fleet to attack Armenian buses moving civilians or soldiers to the war zone. It did not cross his mind that Azerbaijan’s primary goal will be to control the entire air space of Artsakh, followed by a systematic targeting of artillery positions protecting the strategic heights of the contact line, and only sophisticated drones acquired by Armenia, well ahead of any enemy campaign, can stop the advance of Azeri tanks and “Special Forces” units leading the assault on Armenian positions.

The same warped logic was applied by Mr. Tonoyan, with the full blessing of PM Pashinyan, to the purchase of four Su-30SM (Sukhoi Su-30). In April 2019, while on an official visit to Russia, Mr. Tonoyan announced that the four fighter aircrafts will be delivered to Armenia in early 2020, and more will follow to push the total number to a dozen.

Two costly mistakes were made by Mr. Tonoyan prior and during the purchasing process: 

a)

1) He forgot to order with the jets the appropriate missiles needed to engage Turkish and Azeri interceptors. He assumed that Armenian jets will be able to roam freely in the combat zone, destroy Azeri positions with air-to-ground missiles, and return to their base safely. Consequently, when the jets were delivered to the Armenian Air Force they only had pods for rockets effective ground targets only.
None of the jets were equipped with Fox 1 (semi-active homing missiles), Fox 2 (heat seeking missiles) or Fox 3 (active homing radar missiles), all of them very critical for aerial engagements of hostile aircrafts. The four SU-30 remained grounded during the Second Artsakh war simply because it did not make sense to sacrifice very expensive toys for limited tactical gains, especially when Azerbaijan enjoyed the unconditional and the full support of Turkey's Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). Meaning by the time the Armenian jets were airborne, Turkey would have warned Azerbaijan, and adequate measures would have been taken to destroy the aircraft well before any of them reached an intended enemy target.

b)  2) Mr. Tonoyan and PM Pashinyan never entertained the possibility that for the price of 4 fighter jets, Armenia can acquire from a variety of sources 80 suicide drones that can inflict considerable damage on Azeri troops without endangering the life of any Armenian pilot.

 PM Pashinyan’s blunders were not strictly confined to the multiple military fiascos that claimed thousands of lives in Artsakh. His myopic diplomatic manoeuvres made a bad military situation worse, especially in mid-October 2020 when President Putin gave him a valuable opportunity to stop the war and keep 95% of Artsakh intact, but he declined the offer President Putin placed on the bargaining table.

According to press releases from the Russian Presidential Palace (Kremlin), following negotiations President Putin conducted directly with Pashinyan and Aliyev on October 19 and 20, the Russian President “…managed to convince President Aliyev that it was possible to end hostilities, but the return of refugees, including to Shusha, was a mandatory condition on his part,”

“Unexpectedly for me, the position of our Armenian partners was that they perceived this as something unacceptable,” Putin continued. “Prime Minister Pashinyan told me openly that he viewed this as a threat to the interests of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. I do not quite understand the essence of this hypothetical threat, I mean, it was about the return of civilians to their homes, while the Armenian side was to have retained control over this section of Nagorno-Karabakh, including Shusha, and meaning that our peacekeepers were there, which we have agreed upon both with Armenia and Azerbaijan. At that point, the prime minister told me that his country could not agree to this, and that it would struggle and fight.”

PM Pashinyan, after signing the Nov. 09, 2020 trilateral agreement formalizing the Armenian capitulation, spent a considerable amount of time and effort to deny, with sophisticated tales, that he was ever offered by President Putin a chance to end military hostilities in mid-October and thus prevent the loss of thousands of innocent lives. Is President Putin giving himself undeserved merits as a shrewd negotiator by promoting a bunch of lies? Or could it be that PM Pashinyan is gaslighting his own nation?

One more time, at the next elections in Armenia, every Armenian eligible voter, prior to casting his/her vote, should read multiple times the following warning of novelist Octavia Butler:

"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." 

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