Nagorno Karabakh ready for another war: The National Interest

PanARMENIAN.Net - While the Nagorno Karabakh military is grossly outspent by its Azeri neighbors to the east, Karabakh and Armenia have made major moves to ensure Azerbaijan doesn’t catch them flat-footed again following the events in early April, The National Interest said in an article.

Azerbaijan on April 2 launched an overt military attack against Nagorno Karabakh; hundreds of soldiers and civilians died on both sides. The parties eventually reached an agreement on the cessation of hostilities on April 5 in Moscow.

“We are strengthening our front line very actively, very intensively,” Artak Beglaryan, the spokesman for Nagorno Karabakh's Prime Minister, said inside his third-floor office in downtown Stepanakert in early September.

“In April, we didn’t have enough cameras on the front line. Now we are installing [a] modern C4ISR system on the front line, which allows us to observe the entire line with certain depth.”

Using this new advanced system, the Karabakh government claims they’ll be able to “significantly decrease the chance of an Azerbaijani sudden attack, because any kind of movement in the deep territory of Azerbaijan” will be detected by short- and long-distance cameras, “giving the Karabakh army an opportunity to get prepared for strong protection and counter-attack, as well as to target their military units and equipment in advance.”

Azerbaijan, flush with oil profits that have since almost entirely evaporated, has been boosting its military spending by record numbers, pouring billions of dollars into the purchase of Russian-made weapons. The country of some 9.5 million people spent almost $5 billion on its military in 2015 alone, including acquiring a whopping one hundred new T-90 tanks—the most advanced tank in service with the Russian Ground Forces.

On September 7, Armenia’s president officially announced that Moscow had agreed to lend Yerevan $200 million to purchase upgraded military weaponry at reduced rates. Many of these soon-to-be-acquired Armenian weapons—Smerch multiple rocket launchers, Igla shoulder-fired air-defense missiles, TOS-1 thermobaric rocket launchers and antitank missiles—seem destined for the 1994 cease-fire line where hostilities broke out in April.

While Karabakh itself remains coy about whether the new weapons will directly benefit its own armed forces, regional experts expect the hardware will make its way at some point to the de facto independent Nagorno Karabakh Republic.

According to the prime minister’s spokesman, the surprise April attack was launched because of a mix of motives, both military and political. “It was the right moment, the right time, for Azerbaijan to try to use the military misbalance between the Armenian [and Karabakh] side and Azerbaijan. At that moment, Azerbaijan had received much more weaponry and Armenia had not been provided with new armament. Azerbaijan knew this and they tried to use that chance.”

If another war is coming to Nagorno Karabakh, it “will be sooner rather than later,” Beglaryan said, “maybe before the year is over.”