Such an Incident Did Not Happen: Defense Ministry Spokesperson on Prime Minister's Son's 'Conflict'

“For the umpteenth time, Hraparak is once again playing with people's destinies by turning everything upside down. The article titled ‘PRIME MINISTER'S SON HAS HAD A CONFLICT...’ will certainly generate a lot of views for the site, but it has nothing to do with reality,” wrote the spokesman for the Armenian Ministry of Defense, Artsrun Hovhannisyan on his Facebook page, referring to a publication by hraparak.am.

“Such a thing has not happened at all. If you ask your brothers or comrades-in-arms, they will confirm that such conversations are characteristic of all collectives and structures, and all freshmen face various adaptation issues and time which is resolved thanks to the competent work of the command.

“All this has been presented by Hraparak with gross inaccuracies and unacceptable qualifications. However, that is not all. Presenting unverified information in such a way that it violates the personal dignity and values of a soldier, while simultaneously putting several servicemen at risk, can only be done by someone who has no accountability or does not respect military uniforms. The soldier is the army, and the army is the nation. I leave the conclusions to the reader...

P.S. If you put a headline in big letters tomorrow targeting me, remember, I do not expect anything else from you. However, I kindly ask you not to interfere with the lives of soldiers; there are very delicate issues involved.”

It is noteworthy that just hours ago, hraparak.am published an article regarding Ashot Pashinyan, stating that he had engaged in a brawl with the grandson of Zori Balayan. Below, we present the publication.

Our source in Artsakh reported remarkable news to us, indicating that a few days ago, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's son, Ashot Pashinyan, has fallen into a notable incident within his military unit. He has decided that just as his father is establishing 'order' in Armenia, he too has the obligation to establish order in his military unit. He has started to instruct soldiers and even the command staff left and right.

He has made remarks to the cooks, informed the unit's leadership about undisciplined soldiers, and so on. In short, he violated unwritten rules, which infuriated fellow servicemen. One of them physically assaulted Ashot Pashinyan. We were told that the altercation occurred with the grandson of writer and publicist Zori Balayan, who serves in the same military unit as Ashot Pashinyan.

We contacted Zori Balayan. He confirmed that his grandson and the Prime Minister's son are fellow servicemen: “They are a bit far from each other because one arrived half a year earlier than the other, but they are together on the ground,” he said.

We asked if there had been a conflict between them. “My grandson has been in the hospital for 16 days now; I keep going to visit him, and before that, he had also been in clinics.” When we insisted that our sources confirmed that such an incident had occurred, Mr. Balayan did not deny it: “If such a thing happened, then it happened about half a year ago, but now he is in the hospital.”