What is Aliyev allowed? Military expert about Azerbaijan's provocations?

Since first of September, Azerbaijan resumed military and propaganda provocations against Armenia. If in the previous days the enemy was shooting in the direction of Sotk and Norabak, today Kapan airport was added to their targets. Apart from that, the Azerbaijani propaganda machine is engaged in disinformation and propaganda provocations.

What causes the activation of the enemy and what to expect from his actions? In a conversation with "Detq" reporter, military expert Hayk Nahapetyan emphasizes that in order to answer these questions, it is necessary to accept as a starting point the fact that the war is not over.

“This is our daily life, we must understand that the war is not over, and the war has different manifestations at different times. For example, Artsakh is a besieged fortress, the gates of which the West, together with Azerbaijan, is trying to open through Aghdam. Nikol Pashinyan and Arayik Harutyunyan are committed to it as well. One of the manifestations is that. they want to open the gates, but they can't.

On the other hand, what happened near Sotk with the use of artillery is a repetition of the actions of May 11-13. There is an objective problem - to take full control of the Sotk mine.

If their task is to take strategically important heights and combat bases along a rather long section of the contact line, they are carrying out the operation of September 13-14, large-scale military operations. If, let's say, we have to occupy the territory of a state, a huge territory, not heights, there is a 44-day war, not the occupation of heights, and an undeclared war.

Depending on what problem the leadership of Azerbaijan is solving, and to what extent it is allowed to take this or that step to solve that problem, there are provocations of different volumes. It is not that Aliyev can do whatever he wants. For example, he is not given the authority to blow up the region, he is not allowed to alienate huge territories from Armenia and annex it, because the region will explode, power centers will be involved. But Aliyev is allowed, for example, to take strategically important heights in the context of justifying border incidents.

The problem now is that we do not collectively understand that the war is not over. There are different stages of the manifestation of war, now it is not the stage of hot war, where there are large-scale operations with the capture of territories, but the goal has not changed. In particular, encircling Artsakh and starving people are also an element of war. Now our task is to understand it, the political elite must explain it to the people.

After the 44-day war, when Azerbaijan carried out large-scale operations for the first time, it was on September 13-14 of last year, we had serious losses, but on May 11-13 of this year, when an attempt was made to take the Sotk mine under control, there were rebuffed. Now, according to my data, Azerbaijan has no advance and has received a response with victims and wounded on both sides. In other words, the Armenian side is capable of resisting small battles in the form of provocations, but in larger-scale operations, as in September last year, we actually suffered a defeat, because there were quite serious forces involved, which we did not have the equivalent of.