There is no military solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem. The Minister of Education and Science of Armenia, Armen Ashotyan, told the aforesaid to Haqqin.az news agency of Azerbaijan.

“It is time to reconcile with this; this is an axiom. And only then will it be possible to get out of this situation minimum losses for the region and the two nations. The Armenia and the NKR [i.e., the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic] armies will prevent all other attempts.

“We will settle the Karabakh, the Karabakh-Azerbaijani issue together. You will come to Armenia and see how we, both Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, are developing.

“And we strongly condemn the helicopter incident. Peace in the South Caucasus was literally hanging by a thread. [But] we [, the Armenian side,] managed to prevent a full-scale war solely owing to the professionalism of the Armenian leadership and the soldiers of the Nagorno-Karabakh army,” Ashotyan noted, in particular.

To the aforesaid Azerbaijani news agency’s remarks that, “the helicopter was shot by Russian weapons,” the Armenian minister responded: “The Azerbaijani troops have shot the helicopter by violating the ceasefire which Azerbaijan had requested, in 1994, from Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.”

The Azerbaijani armed forces violated the ceasefire and shot down an NKR Air Force helicopter on November 12. The chopper was downed during a training flight, and it crashed very close to the Karabakh-Azerbaijan Line of Contact. As a result, three pilots were killed: the commander of the helicopter, Major Sergey Sahakyan, as well as Senior Lieutenant Sargis Nazaryan and Lieutenant Azat Sahakyan.

The adversary, on the other hand, was firing intensive shots toward the crash site, thus, not allowing access to the area.

But the remains of these three military servicemen plus some necessary parts of the chopper were retrieved from the helicopter’s crash site through a special operation by the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic armed forces. As a result, the Azerbaijanis suffered serious casualties, whereas the Armenian side sustained none.