Major-General Grigori Khachaturov is the former commander of the Armenian army’s Third Corps mostly stationed in northern Tavush province bordering Azerbaijan. He received a major military award and was promoted to the rank of major-general after leading a successful military operation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in July 2020, less than three months before the outbreak of the six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Khachaturov, 48, was among four dozen high-ranking military officers who accused Pashinian’s government of incompetence and misrule and demanded its resignation in February 2021. The unprecedented demand was welcomed by the Armenian opposition but condemned as a coup attempt by Pashinian.
In a separate statement issued in March 2021, Khachaturov said “every day and hour” of Pashinian’s rule “erodes” Armenia’s national security. He was fired a few months later.
The general was arrested in March 2023 on charges of money laundering strongly denied by him. An appeals court agreed to release him on bail on December 1, 2023.
The Office of the Prosecutor-General said on Monday that in a separate criminal investigation, Khachaturov has been charged with giving a bribe and abusing his powers during the war. It declined to give any details of the charges dismissed by his lawyer, Mihran Poghosian, as “absurd.”
Later in the day, a court of first instance refused to approve an arrest warrant for Khachaturov issued by investigators. The decision means that the general, who is not in Armenia at the moment, will not be arrested if he returns home. The prosecutors said they will appeal against it.
Khachaturov’s father Yuri was the chief of the Armenian army’s General Staff from 2008-2016. He served as secretary general of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization when the current Armenian authorities indicted him, former President Robert Kocharian and two other former officials in 2018 over their alleged role in a 2008 post-election unrest in Yerevan.
They were cleared of “overthrow of the constitutional order” in April 2021 after Armenia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the accusation, rejected by them as politically motivated, is unconstitutional. The Court of Cassation overturned the acquittal in September 2024, paving the way for their new trial.