Nagorno Karabakh's armed forces have been substantially strengthened by large deliveries of weaponry over the past two years, said the head of the armed forces of the breakaway territory, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty:
"We have never had a situation which we have now in terms of obtaining concrete weapons and military hardware,” their top commander, General Movses Hakobian, told a news conference in Stepanakert.
Hakobian said the arms acquisitions have been so extensive that the Karabakh Armenian military has difficulty storing them and plans to build a new arms depot for that purpose. He declined to specify the types of new weaponry delivered to it.
Providing no details is standard practice. Armenians, both in Yerevan and in Karabakh (which broke away from Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Soviet Union), tend to talk big about their military might but provide few details. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, loves to tout its weapons purchases, probably to the point of exaggeration.
(Incidentally, the most authoritative source of real data on arms sales and transfers is the database of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which does a pretty complete (or, as complete as you can get) accounting of arms deals around the world. But remarkably, the database has absolutely no information on Karabakh, or the other ex-Soviet breakaway republics of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transniester, underscoring again what a black hole this part of the world is for verifiable information.)
I asked Emil Sanamyan, editor of Armenian Reporter and a good observer of military issues in the South Caucasus, what this might have been about, and he said that the armed forces of Armenia and Karabakh are so integrated that Armenia shipping arms to Karabakh is essentially an internal process:
Since Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh essentially have one military force (just wearing slightly different patches), whatever Armenia gets is essentially what NK gets. The question of whether particular weapons systems are deployed in NK's territory or not is really not that important since stuff can always be moved around. And then some systems, like the S-300s or aircraft, don't have to be physically based in NK to provide NK with full coverage.
What does happen is that for purposes of international accounting via the CFE and the Vienna process, only the units based within Armenia proper can be inspected and even then there are limitations. So for example, Armenia has consistently declared only about 100+ tanks over the last decade, whereas at least as many if not more tanks participate in semi-annual exercises held in NK.
(Sanamyan adds that Azerbaijan uses its own tricks to evade CFE rules, by claiming that "a large number of their units are based on the territory that is in fact under Armenian control, so these units also fall outside any inspections regime.")
Anyway, that's all a long way of saying that we have no idea what the Karabakh forces actually got. But they seemed to turn up the rhetoric a notch, anyway, with the claim that they are bursting at the seams with weapons. (And his announcement was in the context of an allegedly "unprecedented meeting" of Armenian military leaders in Stepanakert.) Is there any fire to this smoke?
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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