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Recently a few Azerbaijani media outlets rushed to voice the “fact” that Armenia does not have new weapons, and has not received “Iskander” missile systems from Russia, allegedly basing their publications on Union of Informed Citizens’ (UIC) findings and materials published by SUT.am website.
The Azerbaijani sources even “decorated” their publications with headlines like “Armenia Left without Iskanders” or “Armenia Deprived of Legends”. Allegedly referring to the facts published by UIC, according to which the RA Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Finance informed that the 200 million loan agreement is not being implemented yet, the authors of these Azerbaijani media publications claim that the military equipment displayed during the Independence Day military parade on September 21 was just aimed at “showing off”, and, in reality, it belongs to Russia.
Naturally, “Union of Informed Citizens” has never claimed that Armenia has not obtained weapons (no doubt, such publications would be extremely pleasant for Azerbaijani propagandists). On the contrary, the research made by the NGO has shown that direct payments from the Armenian state budget have been made for all the newly acquired equipment, including the “Iskander” missile systems. In fact, this was confirmed by RA Deputy Minister Davit Tonoyan in his interview to Azatutyun radio station.
In other words, after revealing that no weapons and ammunition was delivered within the framework of the 200 milion loan agreement, Union of Informed Citizens NGO calculated that 70 to 100 million USD was paid directly from the state budget for the “Iskander” missiles.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the NGO addressed the 200 million loan agreement (even listing the weapons to be purchased within the framework of the agreement) without ever mentioning that acquiring “Iskanders” has ever to deal with the agreement in any way.
This means that Day.az and Haqqin.az websites have simply distorted the information on the findings made by the Armenian NGO.
