MOMENT OF TRUTH

The situation in Karabakh develops so rapidly that it’s difficult to follow the flow of events. Diplomats continue talking in parallel with the guns. However, if diplomats have not yet succeeded in achieving the desired results, shells and missiles mostly hit their targets. There is only one big difference – while Azerbaijan is delivering effective strikes against legitimate military targets of the enemy, Armenia is aiming at the peaceful Azerbaijani population of regions located far from the front line.

Even the agreement reached on October 10 with the mediation of Russia on a humanitarian truce between Azerbaijan and Armenia remained on paper. Yerevan tried to take advantage of the ceasefire by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces to restore lost positions on the front line. However, having received a rebuff from the Azerbaijani army, Armenia, in the best traditions of Armenian terrorism, continued to fire ballistic missiles at peaceful cities of Azerbaijan.

On the second day after the Moscow agreements, Armenia fired a missile at the city of Ganja using the Tochka-U operational-tactical missile complex. The strike claimed the lives of 10 civilians and wounded 34 civilians. Several children became orphans.

According to the Aide to the President of Azerbaijan Hikmet Hajiyev, Azerbaijan regards the attack on a residential building in Ganja as a war crime and an act of genocide. He called on the world community to adequately assess these events and not leave the crime unpunished.

But even after that, Azerbaijan showed maximum restraint, trying to remain committed to the humanitarian truce. This was confirmed by the Russian TV channel Дождь reporting from Khankendi two days after the Moscow agreement. It stated that Azerbaijan has ceased to inflict intense strikes since the entry into force of the agreement.

Nevertheless, Baku does not deny that it is forced to respond to provocations in order to suppress the enemy's firing points. According to the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan, on the night of October 14, the Armenian side deployed several operational-tactical missile systems with ballistic missiles at the starting position in the border zone with the occupied Kalbajar district of Azerbaijan. Moreover, the missiles were aimed at the civilian population and infrastructure in Ganja, Mingachevir and other cities of Azerbaijan.

“The Azerbaijani army has taken preventive measures to suppress the missile strike and prevent the repetition of another war crime similar to the one committed by Armenia on October 11 in Ganja. As a result, as a legitimate military target, we neutralized operational-tactical missile systems, which were brought to a state of readiness to launch fire strikes,” the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry reported and blamed the military-political regime of Armenia for the aggravation of the situation.

In response, Yerevan threatened military installations of Azerbaijan, holding Baku responsible for the consequences.

But no statements are able to cancel the photo and video evidence of repeated missile strikes from the territory of Armenia on the cities of Ganja and Mingachevir, which are located far from the contact line, as well as the Khizi and Absheron districts of Azerbaijan. At the same time, Yerevan cannot provide a single proof of Azerbaijan's strikes on the peaceful infrastructure of Armenia. Likewise, it cannot prove the presence of militants from Syria or the military support of Baku from Turkey. These are exactly the issues that Armenia speculates with in its attempts to give the local conflict a large-scale character in order to attract major players in world politics to the confrontation.

Meanwhile, most military experts, with the exception of those who work for Armenian propaganda, unequivocally declare that with the current potential, Azerbaijan simply does not need the services of foreign militias or the military support of its allies in the fight against Armenia. On the contrary, apparently, militants from Syria and Lebanon are fighting on the Armenian side of the front. Moreover, the special services of Azerbaijan have distributed an audio recording of a conversation between Kurdish fighters from the terrorist PKK, who are fighting on the side of Armenia.

However, Armenia's traditional commitment to terrorist methods of struggle is not a secret to anyone, and the Karabakh war is no exception. We still remember the trenches full of corpses of militants from Arab countries fighting on the Armenian side in the early 1990s. Armenian terrorist organizations ASALA, Yerkrapa union of volunteers, Sasna Tsrer periodically show themselves here and there.

In the current round of confrontation in Karabakh, the world community got to know about flagrant facts of violation of all possible humanitarian conventions by Armenia. The most common of these are the placement of firing points in populated areas and among civil infrastructure.

Yerevan is waging about the same dirty struggle in the diplomatic and informational spheres. Armenia operates a network of media resources to distribute fakes and fables about the almost completely destroyed Azerbaijani army, the budget of which, by the way, exceeds the entire state budget of Armenia. While military actions in the region are of a local nature, the information war around Karabakh has long been known for its global character. The topic of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict has firmly occupied the front pages of the world media from the very beginning of Azerbaijan's counter-offensive after the Armenian provocation. Although Yerevan is trying to confuse the world community thanks to the influential Armenian lobby, patronage of a number of countries, as well as the pro-Armenian attitude of a number of Russian and Western media, Baku has managed to break through the so-called information blockade. It is noteworthy that within two weeks President Ilham Aliyev gave interviews to such TV channels as Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, TRT Haber, Channel One, Euronews, CNN, Sky News, RBC, Haber Global, France 24, and Haber Türk.

Almost all experts agree that Azerbaijan is now far from what it was in the 1990s. While Armenia was doing everything to keep the Azerbaijani lands under occupation, Azerbaijan implemented a policy that turned it into a strong, self-sufficient and reliable participant in international relations. Today, Azerbaijan stands at the origins of global energy and transport routes, Baku heads the second largest international organization, the Non-Aligned Movement, a special UN session dedicated to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is convened at the initiative of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

Unlike Azerbaijan, Armenia’s role in international relations is only due to its geopolitical location and the influence of a powerful lobby on the Armenian authorities.

In addition, before provoking Azerbaijan to a counteroffensive, Yerevan should have carefully considered its economic and military potential, as well as the internal political crisis caused by Nikol Pashinyan, who is trying to remain in power.

The Azerbaijani army destroyed the entire engineering infrastructure of Karabakh, captured a colossal amount of military equipment of the occupying forces, eliminated a significant part of the enemy's manpower. Clinging to the status quo, Nikol Pashinyan continues his futile attempts to urge world leaders to demonstrate pithiness or intimidates them with an imaginary Turkish threat. And every time he is reminded that Azerbaijan is conducting military operations on its own territory. The leader of the Karabakh separatists, Arayik Harutyunyan, desperately calls both old and young generations of Armenians under arms, thereby recognizing the critical situation of the occupying Armenian forces.

It is unlikely that even with an immediate ceasefire, Armenia will be able to recover from the strike in the coming years.

Nikol Pashinyan's attempts to reject the basic principles of settlement developed over many years also failed. He is now trying to drag the Karabakh separatists to the negotiating table as a party to the conflict. Two of the four clauses of the Moscow agreement on a humanitarian truce are focused on the invariability of the principles of settlement and the format of negotiations.

Meanwhile, as of October 14, Azerbaijan liberated the Jabrayil district, the village of Hadrut and more than 40 villages of the Jabrayil, Fuzuli, Terter, Khojavend districts from the Armenian Armed Forces. Azerbaijan also occupies strategically important positions on the Murovdag Mountain, in the village of Sugovushan and in other directions.

Judging by the development of events, Baku will ensure the liberation of its territories from the Armenian occupation in full. Either way, the process of returning the occupied territories by Azerbaijan has become irreversible. President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said that now there is neither the status quo, which Armenia tried to keep, nor the line of contact.