This morning, the enemy attempted to attack in the northern, central and southern directions with the support of small groups of fighters and armored vehicles, but was thwarted, and the destruction of sabotage groups continues in the forests of Shushi. The battles are going on as we speak. This is what representative of the Ministry of Defense of Armenia Artsrun Hovhannisyan said during an interview with Petros Ghazaryan on Armenian Public Television, adding that he returned from Stepanakert a short while ago.

“Aliyev declares that the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan are attacking Shushi, making the international community listen to him and feeding his own people with that news, but I don’t know any form of a war during which you seek, find and destroy the attacker. The enemy’s forces try to hide in the forests, enter villages and cause damage. Our men approach and hit a few people, and they escape again. Today they tried to enter Shushi by climbing cliffs. When our men approach them, they see that all the soldiers have flags. In other words, the goal is to place a flag to show that they have allegedly seized the city. November 9th is Flag Day in Azerbaijan, and they want to do something symbolic, but are failing. Perhaps they are doing this under the threat of being sentenced to death since they are suffering casualties and not achieving anything,” Hovhannisyan said.

The representative of the Ministry of Defense said the objective of the Defense Army is to make sure there is no radical change of favorable positions until the sabotage groups are destroyed.

“Aliyev tried to repeat the names of old villages, saying that those villages have been allegedly seized, and he was mocked, now he has given flags to soldiers and told them to place flags. He has also engaged new mercenaries since he is afraid of drafting the reserve officers to not irritate the public,” Hovhannisyan said.

In response to the question about not engaging former soldiers in the war, Hovhannisyan opposed this and said former servicemen are engaged and are meeting specific objectives.

In response to the question about the wide use of UAVs like the Bayraktar and not being able to fight against them, Hovhannisyan said Azerbaijan had started buying UAVs since 2012.

“After suffering an embarrassing defeat in July 2020, Azerbaijan hastily signed a contract with Turkey to purchase UAVs. Azerbaijan hasn’t obtained the high technological weapons and the amount of weapons over the past decade as it has over the past two years. I’m not going into politics, but Armenia also hasn’t obtained as many weapons as it has in the past two years,” Hovhannisyan said.