The demolition of the Monument to Humanity in Kars mirrors the current stage of Armenian-Turkish relations, an expert said.

“All points of contact are being destroyed together with the monument,” Ruben Melkonyan told a news conference in Yerevan. “The move is aimed to gains the votes of nationalists and Azerbaijani diaspora on the threshold of the parliamentary election.”

For his pat, well-known sculptor Levon Tokmajyan noted that the decision to pull down the monument was not caused by its aesthetic defects. “Even if the statue were the handwork of Michelangelo, it would have been dismantled, in line with the Turkish policy,” he said.