How Much Land was Lost throughout the April War: Serzh Sargsyan Clarifies
Our armed forces fulfilled their military mission. Serzh Sargsyan, RA president, said this in an interview to the reporters in the Presidential Aircraft while returning to Yerevan from Vienna, touching upon the observation that both Armenian and Azerbaijani sides talk of victory.
“In my opinion, victory or defeat is the following: what objective did you set and did you fulfill your objective? Here I don’t want to draw backdated conclusions and say—we have won.
I consider, you are all convinced that the programs have failed, that is, if armed forces, if the security system have fulfilled their mission, then you may call it as you wish. You may say they have professionally fulfilled their mission, or you may say they defended our land with the price of their lives. You may say what you want, however, as a result, we come to the point that they have fulfilled their military mission.
We don’t need eternal war. We don’t need armed forces, which will lead to adventurism, maybe they’ll succeed, maybe not. We need armed forces, which will confidently perform their mission, and those missions have been fulfilled. All those attempting to observe shortcomings, issues, and don’t support, their purpose is not supporting but approaching their irresponsible statements to the reality. This is very obvious. If you want me to say that we have won, I may, but the most proper formulation is the following: our armed forces have fulfilled their military mission, and God willing, they will constantly fulfill,” Sezh Sargsyan said.
Touching upon loss of territories, Sezh Sargsyan said there is a map, simple calculations and an assessment.
“If you have lost something, what importance does it have—strategic, military or a psychological? Firstly, if measuring by meters, I must say the following, that the Armenian forces, which had 800.000 hectares as a security zone, have lost some 800 hectares. Strategically or militarily those territories have no importance. From the psychological viewpoint, Azerbaijanis can convince their people that they have achieved something, but at least one soldier was killed and two more wounded for gaining control over just one hectare of land,” Sargsyan said.
By Ofelya Hovhannisyan
