Azerbaijan will be firing from different locations and will be seizing different areas. This is what former Prime Minister of Armenia Vazgen Manukyan told reporters today when he was asked why the adversary [Azerbaijan] is firing in Yeraskh.

“One thing is clear — the issue of Karabakh was a matter of prestige, not a strategic issue, and the Azerbaijanis are meeting the objective. The issue of Syunik Province is a strategic issue not only for Azerbaijan, but also all Turkic-speaking peoples. What they’re doing might seem delirious, but the ultimate goal is to seize Syunik Province,” Manukyan said.

Manukyan said it is necessary to get rid of Nikol Pashinyan as soon as possible since he will lead the country to perdition and added that there has to be a pan-national movement.

When told that citizens voted for Pashinyan in spite of the war and the deaths of 5,000 soldiers, Manukyan said elections have never solved any problem to this day and that all elections have been illegitimate. “Over the past decades, we Armenians learned to rely on the army, but we actually don’t have an army. There is an easier way to solve the issue. We’ll have an army again as soon as we drive Nikol away,” he said.

The situation in the Yeraskh sector of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border has also been tense over the past few days. In the late hours of July 19 and at night, until 2am on July 20, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces continued to shell the Armenian military posts in Yeraskh sector of the border with firearms, without the use of mortars. After the intensive firing that lasted a few hours, head of Yeraskh village Radik Oghikyan received a firearm injury while he was arranging works to extinguish the fire that broke out in the area as a result of the Azerbaijanis’ operations.