YEREVAN (RFE/RL) — The former deputy chief of the general staff of Armenia’s armed forces has been arrested on charges of negligence relating to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, amid ongoing political tensions inside the Caucasus country.
Lieutenant General Tiran Khachatryan was arrested on January 4 and will be detained until his trial. State prosecutors allege that Khachatryan failed to perform his official duties during the 44-day war in 2020 between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Khachatryan has denied the accusations and his legal team say they plan to file an appeal. In a January 5 statement, his lawyers called the charges “groundless” and that the detention of the former high-ranking military officer is retribution for his political views and that he is being scapegoated for Armenia’s “defeat in the war” with Azerbaijan.
The arrest is another sign of the political fault lines opened up in Armenia following Yerevan’s losses to Baku in successive campaigns, which have strained Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s relations with his country’s military and put him under increasing public pressure at home.
The 2020 war, when Azerbaijani forces took control of a chunk of Nagorno-Karabakh, was the second that Azerbaijan and Armenia fought in the last three decades over the breakaway region, which had been under ethnic Armenian separatists’ control, but recognized internationally as part of Azerbaijan since the 1990s.
That was followed by a decisive one-day military operation in September 2023 that saw Azerbaijani forces take control of the remaining parts of the region.
