Armenian armed forces do everything for society to feel protected- minister says

YEREVAN, March 17. / ARKA /. The armed forces will do everything for the Armenian society to feel protected, Armenia’s defense minister Seyran Ohanyan said in an interview with local Russian-language newspaper Golos Armenii (Voice of Armenia).

However, the minister said no one can not rule out the likelihood that the current tense situation could at a point translate into a full-scale war. 

The tension on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Nagorno-Karabakh forces and along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border has been high since early January with virtually daily reports about violations of ceasefire by Azerbaijani troops, shelling of Armenian positions and sabotage raids.

According to Ohanyan, control of the situation means a thorough study and analyses which eventually result in the improvement of tactics and emergence of new defense and preemptive methods to punish the aggressor. 

“If Azerbaijanis can understand only this language, then we should use it to talk to it,” he said.

He said as a result of response actions Armenian forces can calculate the approximate number of casualties on the other side, while neither Azerbaijani media nor its population have any chance of obtaining reliable information about the number of casualties due to strict regulation of information about the situation on the front line.

"The behavior of top Azerbaijani officials indicates that human life has no value for them. They are ready for all sorts of  provocations at any cost- it does not matter that as a result their citizens are killed,' said Ohanyan.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict erupted into armed clashes after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s as the predominantly Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan sought to secede from Azerbaijan and declared its independence backed by succeeding referendum. A truce was brokered by Russia in 1994, although no permanent peace agreement has been signed.

Since then, Nagorno-Karabakh and several adjacent regions have been under the control of Armenian forces of Karabakh. Nagorno-Karabakh is the longest-running post-Soviet era conflict and has continued to simmer despite the relative peace of the past two decades, with snipers causing tens of deaths a year. -0-