On May 16, Russian Ambassador to Armenia Sergey Kopyrkin addressed an open letter to the Minister of Defense of the Republic Suren Papikyan, in which he stated that the former press secretary of the Ministry of Defense of Armenia, and now the head of the Command and Staff Institute of the Military Academy Artsrun Hovhannisyan insulted the memory of the ancestors who fought on the fields of the Great Patriotic War.
EADaily provides the full text of the letter:
"Dear Suren Rafikovich,
Let me sincerely congratulate you on the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, which we solemnly celebrated last week! It was gratifying to see that the anniversary events held on May 9 in Armenia received broad popular support. Residents of the republic, both older and younger generations, came to the war memorials at the call of their hearts to honor the memory of 600 thousand Armenians who left to defend their Homeland, 300 thousand of whom did not return home.
Against the background of deep respect for the Victory Day, the Armenian people were outraged by the historically false and blasphemous statements of the former official representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia A. Hovhannisyan with the actual justification of the aggression of Nazi Germany, voiced by him on this holy date on the country's main TV channel. It was especially painful to hear such statements from the mouth of the man who now heads the Command and Staff Institute of the Military Academy of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia, which bears the name of the famous commander of the Great Patriotic War, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Marshal Baghramyan.
It is difficult to assess such an act as an attempt to desecrate the memory of our heroic ancestors, who prevented the implementation of Hitler's plans to enslave and destroy the peoples of the USSR, and also saved humanity from the "brown plague."
On May 9, Colonel Artsrun Hovhannisyan, a supporter of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, said on Public Television that according to Hitler's plans, the Nazis allegedly had to create a Great Armenia by transferring part of the territory of Turkey to it. He also called a myth the statement that "the victory at Stalingrad saved Armenia from the Turkish invasion."
The opposition parliamentary faction "Armenia" demanded from the Prosecutor General's Office of the republic to give this statement a legal assessment. Historians also condemned Hovhannisyan's words, noting that an attempt is being made to revise the history of the Great Patriotic War at the state level in the country.