Two Soldiers Emerge from Forest After 10 Days of Hiding in Mataghis Direction: Hovhannisyan

Fighting has resumed and is becoming more intense in the morning hours, characterized by shelling, armored vehicles, assaults, and attacks. The Azerbaijani side is attempting to continue its attacks from three to four different directions, reported Ministry of Defense representative Artur Hovhannisyan in an interview with Azatutyun.

When asked how to explain the targeting of military equipment conducting combat duty in the territory of Armenia, near the border with Karvachar, and that according to the Azerbaijani side they hit that equipment as it was preparing to target civilians, Hovhannisyan stated: “If we listen to Azerbaijan’s declaration, we have a 5000-year history in this area. Our Ministry of Defense statement was very clear; it is the equipment on combat duty that was targeted, and for this, they will be held accountable.”

According to Hovhannisyan, one should not expect a different outcome in the war: “On the fourth or fifth day of the war, the President of Artsakh clearly stated that we are going to target military objects, and if there are civilian settlements, they should evacuate and implement what is provided by civil defense. The Azerbaijani military leadership should have carried out all this on the very first day of the war, but they didn’t even do it by the fifth day. Naturally, they will later blame Armenia’s self-defense when they themselves are shelling Stepanakert and Shushi,” the Ministry of Defense representative emphasized.

Speaking about the targeting of strategic objects, Hovhannisyan pointed out that no military personnel or journalists covering military operations can overlook that, for example, a shell did not land under a church wall or on church grounds but hit the dome of the church, with two different shells striking the same area at different times. The church is not a military object.

Regarding the statistics of casualties from both conflicting countries and occasional inaccuracies, he mentioned: “We cannot definitively know or announce our losses, casualties, and missing persons for the society to know. If we are certain that we have no information about a particular individual or find their body, we will report it, but we cannot comment on uncertainty. For instance, I can cite the example that two groups in the southern direction actually emerged from encirclement; yesterday two soldiers came out in the Mataghis direction after hiding in the forest for 10 days. It is clear that we had no information about them, nor did their parents.”

Hovhannisyan stated that the Azerbaijani side does not present numbers regarding their casualties and losses: “I am confident that the whole world knows that we present things accurately; they are hiding it,” he stated.

Regarding publications that terrorists were misled by Azerbaijan, he commented: “Whether they were misled or not is another issue; of course, mercenaries must be deceived. The number of casualties among terrorists is in the hundreds, and bodies are already being sent back to Syria, while some are being eaten by wild boars in the marshes of the Araks Valley.”

When discussing the use of the Iskander missile, he urged not to make analytical assumptions, as there are specialists for that: “The Iskander is a missile; weapons similar to the Iskander are in the arsenal of the Defense Army, which do their job; it is just that the range is greater, and striking it is very difficult.”

As for volunteers wishing to go to the front but facing various barriers, the Ministry of Defense representative stated: “My pure human advice is that those who want to go, regardless of whether they are allowed or not, or whether it is legal or not, should keep knocking on the military recruitment offices’ doors, maintain contact with the recruitment offices, maybe some decision will change.”

Artur Hovhannisyan noted that Azerbaijan has applied most of its arsenal: “In some cases, Azerbaijani armed forces have advanced; those sections are indeed laughably small from the standpoint of military science regarding the losses incurred by the applied forces and from a timing standpoint,” he stated, urging not to focus on specific areas.

He observed that Azerbaijan frequently conducts information-diversion joint operations, meaning they go to a settlement, enter, take pictures, raise a flag, and then our forces hit back, causing them to flee. “They do this because they do not have real, tangible success,” he asserted, indicating that Azerbaijan aimed to capture Artsakh within two to three, perhaps five days. He indicated that this was a planned blitzkrieg.