YEREVAN. – Hraparak daily of Armenia writes: On August 30, the Investigative Committee (IC) of Armenia released a message that the former commander of the Artsakh [(Nagorno-Karabakh)] Defense Army (DA), [ex-defense minister and Artsakh President’s chief advisor] Lieutenant General Mikayel Arzumanyan was detained. The IC's explanation presented as to why they detained Mishko, who is well-known in Artsakh, was the following in one word: they accuse him of handing over Shushi [to Azerbaijan]. Arzumanyan, in fact, may have valuable information about who actually handed over Shushi, or on whose instructions it was handed over.
After this detention, we were told a noteworthy episode from the contacts those days between Mikayel Arzumanyan, who was appointed the Artsakh DA commander on October 26, 2020, and [Prime Minister of Armenia] Nikol Pashinyan during the last days of the war. It turns out that Pashinyan telephoned Arzumanyan very often, inquiring about the situation at the front, and every time he asked the same question. "Did you hand over the Shushi?" At first, Arzumanyan was surprised by that question, and then one day he got angry that, "Should we give [it]?" And when the Prime Minister of Armenia interfered too much and bothered with his "pointless questions", Mikayel Arzumanyan sharply said: "From now on, direct your questions to Onik Viktorovich." We are talking about Onik Gasparyan, the [then] Chief of the General Staff Armed Forces of Armenia. After that, relations between Arzumanyan and Pashinyan became strained.
And on the eve of the fall of Shushi, enemy drones hit a position in Shushi whose location, according to the military’s claim, was impossible to guess if the adversary had not had the coordinates.