YEREVAN. Nov 27 (Interfax) - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has confirmed that his wife Anna Hakobyan visited the command center of the Defense Army of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic during the recent war in the area.
"Some are criticizing my wife now, but they forgot to ask what a member of the prime minister's family was doing in a city being shelled and while 70% of its residents had left it. Some are trying to foment political speculation over the fact that the prime minister's family member visited the Defense Army's command center at the prime minister's request to provide moral support to the Defense Army while it was continually receiving reports that people in the rear were leaving their communities," Pashinyan said in a televised address to the nation.
"Is it a crime when a member of the prime minister's family personally brings water and bread to civilians in shelters? And that's right, some were recalled from Stepanakert for spreading chaos, and these issues have yet to be clarified," he said.
Col. Gen. Movses Hakobyan, who resigned on November 18 as Armenia's chief military inspector, said earlier that he had been recalled from Nagorno-Karabakh during the fighting there after reprimanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's wife.
"I asked Pashinyan's wife to walk out of the command center in Karabakh, because there were so many men in stress, who had to be performing commanding duties there and who could have said some obscenity, and so her presence was undesirable. After that, I was summoned to Yerevan and was forbidden to return to Nagorno-Karabakh," Hakobyan said at a press conference on November 19.