Pashinyan noted that the responsibility for such a decision lies with the previous leadership of the country. As the Prime Minister stated, the plane was delivered in May, and Armenia did not manage to buy missiles before the war. At the same time, Pashinyan took responsibility for the defeat in the armed conflict with Azerbaijan in the fall of 2020.

RBC recalls that in November 2020, the former chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces said that Yerevan had bought fighters without ammunition from Moscow. In 2016, he also dissuaded the country’s leadership from buying planes, but the decision was still changed. The former chief of the General Staff claims that he personally told the Prime Minister that the purchase of the Su-30SM would be a “criminal step”, since Russian laws prohibit the sale of missiles for fighters to third countries. But no one “has read Russian legislation.”