Major-General Grigori Khachaturov was arrested in March this year on charges of money laundering strongly denied by him. A court of first instance allowed prosecutors last month to again extend his pre-trial detention.
Khachaturov’s lawyers challenged that decision in the Anti-Corruption Court of Appeals. The latter agreed to grant him bail. At the same time, it placed the general under so-called “administrative control” involving restrictions on his freedom of movement and communication. The court did not immediately specify the extent of those restrictions.
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 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 charges leveled against the general stem from a controversial criminal case opened against Seyran Ohanian, a former defense minister who now leads the parliamentary group of the main opposition Hayastan alliance.
Ohanian was charged in February with illegally allowing the privatization of properties that belonged to the Armenian Defense Ministry. He rejected the accusations as politically motivated.
The National Security Service (NSS) claimed at the time that Khachaturov “de facto” acquired one of those properties at a knockdown price and used it for obtaining a bank loan worth 18 million drams ($45,000). One of his lawyers dismissed the claim as “laughable.”
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 as well as Ohanian and former President Robert Kocharian in 2018 over their alleged role in a 2008 post-election unrest in Yerevan. Armenia’s Constitutional Court declared coup charges brought against them unconstitutional in 2021.
Yuri Khachaturov and his second son Igor actively participated in last year’s antigovernment protests staged by the country’s main opposition forces.