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Armenia is “on the brink of war”, political analyst Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan warned during a public forum hosted by Voskanapat think tank on Monday.

“Our society must be prepared for war. We are on the verge of war; our population must know about it and be ready for it,” the analyst stressed.

He noted the authorities constantly assure that the processes which took place in Armenia have brought the country to such a level of democracy that rules out an attack on the country.

"This is what they consider to be one of the main guarantees of security, rather than the army and the development of the economy. Obviously, no one can really believe in this theory except the authorities, and the perception of democracy is not the way it’s presented to the public,” he stressed.

“But the developments of the last two years show that there is a large group of the public in Armenia who blindly believes in any word uttered by [Prime Minister] Nikol Pashinyan. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan was repeatedly conducting large-scale military exercises over the past one year and a half, doing its best to prepare for war,” the political analyst said.

Melik-Shahnazaryan believes the only reason Azerbaijan has not launched a war yet is the high combat readiness of the Armenian army.

He stressed that Azerbaijan is getting ready for war, while Armenia is not preparing for it. In Melik-Shahnazaryan’s words, Nikol Pashinyan's government has focused its attention on the domestic political developments, lacking external risk assessment mechanisms.

According to the expert, the mediators and the international community speak the same language in the Artsakh negotiation process, while the Armenian authorities have dropped out of this cooperation.

“In fact, our state position contradicts the one of the international community. Azerbaijan did not take much effort to achieve this. The country took advantage of the fact that the new Armenian authorities had no insight into the logic of the negotiation process, the existing risks and opportunities. First of all, Azerbaijan has eliminated its obligations under the Vienna and St. Petersburg agreements, replacing them with the ones reached on the spot at elevators,” he stressed.