YEREVAN, OCTOBER 5, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan gave an interview to The New York Times over the ongoing Azerbaijani aggression unleashed against Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh).

Armenpress presents the article about the interview:

“When Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, spoke by telephone on Thursday with President Trump’s national security adviser, he raised a delicate issue: Why is nothing being done to stop a longtime United States ally, Turkey, from using American-made F-16 jets against Armenians?

Mr. Pashinyan’s call to the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, followed an eruption of heavy fighting in and around Nagorno Karabakh.

But the current fighting, Mr. Pashinyan said in a telephone interview, has taken on a far more dangerous dimension because of Turkey’s direct military intervention in support of Azerbaijan.

The conflict has set off alarms about the risks of a wider war and put the United States, with its large and politically influential Armenian diaspora, in the uncomfortable position of watching Turkey, a NATO member, deploying F-16 jets in support of Armenia’s enemies.

“The United States,” Mr. Pashinyan said in an interview, “needs to explain whether it gave those F-16s to bomb peaceful villages and peaceful populations.” He said that Mr. O’Brien had “heard and acknowledged” his concerns.

For Armenia, Mr. Pashinyan said, the current fighting, which began Sept. 27 after months of rising tensions, poses an “existential threat” because of the role of Turkey, whose precursor, the Ottoman Empire, killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the end of World War I. The U.S. Congress and many countries have declared that slaughter a “genocide,” which Turkey still rejects”.