Were Iskander missiles even used in Karabakh war? Opinions from Baku
After the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan announced the use of the Russia-manufactured Iskander missile system in the second Karabakh war, there was a reaction not only from Armenia and Russia, but also from Azerbaijan.
Comments from Baku boil down to the question: were Iskander missiles even used?
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What happened?
In an interview with the opposition Armenian TV channel ArmNews, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan admitted to the use of the Iskander operational-tactical missile system during the second Karabakh war.
In doing so, he answered ex-President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who accused the current authorities of the country that they did not use this weapon.
“Let him ask the question why the Iskander missile didn’t explode? Or why did it explode by 10 percent, for example?” Pashinyan said at the time, asking the former head of state through journalists.
The next day, there was a harsh reaction from Moscow to the words of the head of the Armenian government.
Reaction from Ilham Aliyev
On February 26, at a press conference by the President of Azerbaijan for local and foreign journalists, the correspondent of the Russian TV channel Zvezda asked Ilham Aliyev about Pashinyan’s statement on the use of the Iskander missile during the second Karabakh war.
“As for the statement of the Prime Minister of Armenia in connection with the Iskander missile system, it also raised questions in our minds. I would not like to be ironic on this topic, there have already been enough comments among Russian officials, members of the Russian parliament, and experts that the rocket will explode by 10 percent, of course, we must try very hard to make this happen.
We didn’t see the launch of Iskander missiles, we didn’t see it. Therefore, when this statement was announced, yesterday we asked again. But no, we didn’t see that. This is just another, I would say, public blunder. There were already a lot of them.
And in principle, what is happening in Armenia now resembles some kind of tragicomedy scene. This is how I would describe what is happening there,”Aliyev replied.
Was Iskander ever present – commentary of the former Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan
In his commentary on this issue, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan, Tofig Zulfugarov, expressed doubts about the presence of Iskander OTRK in the Armenian armed forces.
“There is a heated discussion on the Internet about whether the Iskander OTRK is good or bad … I decided to re-publish the publication from three years ago in order to shift the discussion to a more important channel for us – do the Armenians have this complex or not?
The Armenians never had it, therefore they did not use it. And the topic was launched by Pashinyan in order to provoke Sargsyan to tell the truth – Armenia’s Iskanders are a propaganda fake launched by pro-Armenian circles of Russia with the aim of creating fear in Azerbaijan of Armenia’s “military might”. When a general has no soldiers, he fights with his tongue.
Now we are waiting, who will be the first to blab out and tell the truth Pashinyan, Sargsyan or Lavrov?” wrote Zulfugarov on his Facebook page.
