Armenia’s defense minister Davit Tonoyan says he is especially concerned over the activation of Azerbaijani armed forces in the Nakhijevan direction of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, where a relative calm existed until now.
“Any manifestation of military provocation in this section is fraught with incitement of crisis, which will also relate to other regional actors,” Tonoyan said during an interview with EADaily.
At the same time, Tonoyan emphasized that Armenia is not in a status of peace requester and that it might not endure the temptation of using its entire military arsenal in an event of an Azerbaijan aggression.
“Along with Armenia’s constructive stance, I wouldn’t want you to have an impression that Armenia is in a position of a peace requestor. I would advise the Azerbaijani side not to be so certain that it is the one controlling the issue of escalating the military situation. Meaning it will not be the way that mediators will succeed in convincing the Armenian side to stop response-punitive actions in an event of Azerbaijan re-launching military operations, even in an event if limited scale military operations carried out by Baku. In an event of a repetition of the 2016 April War aggression scenario the Armenian side might not refrain from the temptation of using its entire available arsenal to give a massive and decisive counter-blow to the adversary,” Tonoyan said.
Speaking about the dangers of new large scale military operations and Azerbaijani build-ups of manpower and military equipment along the Artsakh-Azerbaijan line of contact, the Armenian defense minister said that the likelihood of resumption of large scale military operations is always high in conditions of Baku’s maximalist demands during negotiations.
“Reports about the activation and build-ups of Azerbaijani military are accurate and similar processes are observed not only at the Artsakh-Azerbaijan line of contact, but also at the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, namely in the Nakhijevan direction. Azerbaijan’s conduct is nothing else but threat to use force, whereas it is the ruling out of the use of force that is the basis of the peaceful settlement process of the NK conflict, like of any other conflict,” he said.