Civilnet
By Siranush Adamyan
Armenia’s former acting head of the National Security Service (NSS), Mikayel Hambardzumyan, says he has no answer as to why Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan did not stop the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, even after top military officials warned that Armenia was losing the fight.
In an interview with News.am published Tuesday evening, Hambardzumyan said that by mid-October the situation on the front line had become “terrifying,” and that on October 19, Chief of the General Staff Onik Gasparyan formally told a meeting of Armenia’s Security Council that the situation was “critical.” Then-Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan confirmed that assessment, Hambardzumyan added.
Hambardzumyan, who served as acting NSS director from September 30 to November 7, 2020, said his agency maintained around-the-clock communication with its counterparts in Nagorno-Karabakh, exchanging intelligence and addressing operational challenges. “By the middle of October, things were getting worse,” he recalled. “At the October 19 meeting, Gasparyan officially informed all Security Council members that the situation was dire.”
Asked why the prime minister did not move toward a ceasefire after receiving those reports, Hambardzumyan said: “I don’t know the answer to your question, because, first, I wasn’t working directly with the country’s leader to understand what he was doing or planning to do. Second, at the time I didn’t even know about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s proposal to stop the war—which Pashinyan reportedly declined. I learned about that only later.”
He said that once the war continued, “the problems started to snowball, becoming more unmanageable,” eventually leading to the southern breakthrough near Horadiz and the Azerbaijani advance toward Shushi. “At that stage, you start asking yourself even more: why isn’t the war being stopped, especially since the Russians had already made it clear that there was such a possibility,” he said.
Hambardzumyan also hinted that frustration over the government’s wartime decisions contributed to his resignation on November 7. “Don’t take that reason lightly—it’s a very global reason,” he said. “The first thought that crosses your mind is: maybe the political leadership is waiting until the fall of Stepanakert before making a decision.”
He dismissed claims that Russia failed to help Armenia during the war, saying: “There’s no other country on the planet that did more for Armenia during the 44 days than Russia. The fact that the war didn’t continue to Stepanakert—or even to Armenia itself—was indeed because of Russia.”
Addressing the 2023 fall of Nagorno-Karabakh, Hambardzumyan said Armenia should not have expected Russia to intervene after its own government recognized the region as part of Azerbaijan. “Sometimes people act as if Russia has adopted us and must constantly take care of us,” he said. “But what did we do in September—for Artsakh, for its people? When Pashinyan, our political leader, publicly declared from the highest podiums that it was Azerbaijani territory, what more could we expect from anyone else?”
The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war began on September 27 and ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire on November 9. Armenia suffered a devastating defeat, losing around 4,000 soldiers and ceding control over the southern territories of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the entire Hadrut district. Following the ceasefire, Armenian forces withdrew from all seven surrounding regions that had come under their control during the first Karabakh war in the 1990s.
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