Moscow bites back after Armenian PM claims Russia's Iskander missiles 'don't explode'
Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan gave his first big interview of the year to a local pro-Western news platform recently, in which he expressed doubt about the efficacy of Russia’s Iskander missile systems, claiming they ‘did not explode or only exploded 10% of the time’.
Viktor Zavarzin, deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma’s defense committee, has already reacted to Nikola Pashinyan statement by accusing him of lying.
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System failure?
During the interview, Pashinyan commented on some of the recent statements made on the opposition TV Channel ArmNews by ex-President Serzh Sargsyan on February 16, in which the former president criticized the Armenian authorities for not using the Russian Iskander missile systems in the fall of 2020, during the 4th and 5th days of the second Karabakh war.
Pashinyan responded by saying that the ex-president himself knows the answers to his questions:
“Let him ask himself the question of why didn’t the Iskander missile explode? Or why did it only explode 10% of the time?”
After this statement, the journalist asked PM Pashinyan again how this could be possible, to which Pashinyan replied:
“I do not know. Maybe the weapon was made in the 80s”.
Moscow bites back
Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian State Duma Viktor Zavarzin criticized Nikol Pashinyan’s statements, claiming the latter was trying to ‘absolve himself of the blame for the failings in the Karabakh war:’
“When [this] person is trying to appear innocent, he is trying to put blame on Iskander missiles, the people of Armenia, and the military. This, of course, is not true. In our country, ‘Iskander’ has proven itself to be a very high-precision weapon, and has shown a great degree of success in various exercises. These [Pashinyan’s statements] are just absolute lies – it is not even subject to any doubt”.
