Even before the start of the war, many things were not "right"—starting from the public administration system to military issues. Tiran Khachatryan, the former First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Armenia, told reporters this Monday at Yerablur Military Pantheon in Yerevan—and with respect to the 44-day Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in the fall of 2020.

"With our participation we could have contributed to the solution of those problems. But they [i.e., the incumbent Armenian authorities] did not want the presence of people like us in that system. There is a simple truth: an arbitrary person cannot engage in something he does not know. If a man does not know the order of preparing the state for war, the sequence of steps, how can he do it? Explain as much as you want," he said.

Speaking about the sad outcome of the aforesaid war and the chances of achieving a victory in it, Khachatryan said: "Everything was possible. But in the conditions of the situation we had during the 44-day war, if someone genius with supernatural powers stands up, says it was possible to win, I will say it is a lie."

Asked whether the General Staff could have reported something else to PM Nikol Pashinyan and he was misled as a result, Tiran Khachatryan responded that Pashinyan says different things on different matters, and they are not close to the truth.

And to the remark that the Armenian authorities claim that in the first days of the war the then chief of the General Staff, Onik Gasparyan, had not proposed to stop the war, whereas Gasparyan says something else, Tiran Khachatryan said: "We discussed that matter with the former chief of the General Staff—[on] what reports, what proposals have been made. I believe that the former chief of the General Staff reported about it.”