Military expert: Yerevan pre-planned diversion against Azerbaijan

By Azernews

By Rashid Shirinov

Armenia’s armed provocation against Azerbaijan has been prepared by Yerevan in advance, Azerbaijan’s military expert, former deputy defense minister, retired lieutenant-general, Chingiz Mammadov, told Trend.

On December 29, Azerbaijani Armed Forces have prevented an attempt by an Armenian reconnaissance-raiding group to cross the Azerbaijani-Armenian state border. After the shootout the Armenian units were forced to retreat, suffering loses.

Yerevan, refusing to sit at a negation table with Baku, again resorts to armed and political provocations with a view to keep the status-quo.

Mammadov said that Yerevan committed a provocation to draw attention of the CSTO member-states to the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict after the Armenian delegation failed to achieve election of an Armenian representative as the CSTO secretary general at the organization’s recent session in St. Petersburg.

The military expert said that while gradually spreading misinformation about diversions in the region, not related to the Nagorno-Karabakh area, Armenia aims to artificially expand the scale of the conflict and involve other CSTO members in it.

Armenia captured Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions from Azerbaijan in a war that followed the Soviet breakup in 1991. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and nearly 1 million were displaced as a result of the war.

Large-scale hostilities ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994 but Armenia continued the occupation in defiance of four UN Security Council resolutions calling for immediate and unconditional withdrawal.

Peace talks mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. have produced no results so far.