Late Russian pundit: Armenians sought to seize Azerbaijan’s lands by starting first armed conflict

Igor Korotchenko, Russian military expert and editor-in-chief of the “National Defence” magazine, shared the video of the conversation with Ruslan Khasbulatov, a prominent Russian politician, academician and the last chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, who passed away recently.

In the video, Khasbulatov, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union, stated that it was the Armenians who dealt the most powerful blow to the USSR, Caliber.Az reports.

"They started an open armed conflict to seize someone else's territory. Even though the majority [of residents there are] Armenians, Nagorno-Karabakh belonged to Azerbaijan under the terms of the constitution and the law. And instead of resolving the issue peacefully, maybe through a congress, they decided to start an armed struggle.

And after these events, the whole world saw that the central government [was weak]. By the way, the KGB [Committee for State Security] should have taken care of this, without waiting for Mikhail Gorbachev's instructions; protecting the state is the function of the KGB. The USSR spilt over from the Caucasus. When this armed war started, the Baltics saw that no one was taking any serious action," Khasbulatov said.

Ruslan Khasbulatov (November 22, 1942, Grozny - January 3, 2023, Mozhaisk district, Moscow Oblast) – a Russian politician, scholar and publicist, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1991), the last chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), firstly the supporter of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, then his main opponent and active participant in the Russian constitutional crisis of October 1993; in 1994, he organized the "peacekeeping mission of Professor Khasbulatov in Chechnya. From 1994 until the end of his life, he headed the Department of World Economics at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.