YEREVAN. Nov 19 (Interfax) - Col. Gen. Movses Hakobyan, who resigned on Wednesday as Armenia's chief military inspector, has said he was recalled from Nagorno-Karabakh during the hostilities over a remark he made to the wife of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
"I asked Pashinyan's wife to leave the command center in Karabakh, as command was being exercised, with so many tense men who could swear, and her presence was undesirable. I was summoned to Yerevan after that," Hakobyan told a press conference on Thursday.
Hakobyan said he was banned from returning to Nagorno-Karabakh.
"I wrote to Pashinyan, asking him to send me back to Karabakh, but he even didn't read my message. Then I was sent for a coronavirus test and a lung check. The results were negative, but then documents somehow appeared saying that I had pneumonia, which wasn't true. I was told I couldn't return to Karabakh, enter the command center, because I allegedly had coronavirus. Draw conclusions yourself," Hakobyan told reporters.
It was reported in late October that the Armenian prime minister's wife, Anna Hakobyan, said she intended to go to the Karabakh conflict zone.
"A unit of 13 women, including me, is preparing for training. A few days later, we'll be deployed to protect the borders of our fatherland. We cannot give up either our fatherland or our dignity to the enemy," she said on Facebook on October 26.
The Azerbaijani Armed Forces launched hostilities in the Karabakh conflict zone on September 27. Late on November 9, the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia adopted a trilateral statement on a ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh, the deployment of Russian peacekeepers to the region, and the transfer of a number of districts in the region to Azerbaijan. People in Armenia have taken that statement as capitulation.