Amidst Chaos: A Soldier's Tale from the Battle of Shusha

“The advance of the enemy (Azerbaijan) was not a big surprise to me. The tension had been palpable in the area, but I was surprised by the violence that followed. Our initial job was to fire long range artillery from the 2S1 Gvozdika, into Azeri tanks and vehicles.

The enemy advance was moving quite quickly, and our self-propelled artillery gun was told to move several different times. It was very chaotic and confusing, especially for me. This was my first combat experience.

Our soldiers (Armenian infantry) began coming down the road. (The 2S1 Gvozdika was traveling toward the front, the infantry were traveling away from the frontline.) I was initially not concerned about this as we had seen soldiers on the road all the time.

More kept coming and I stopped the vehicle and asked where we should go? It was decided that this part of the frontline may be collapsing, so we should travel with this infantry as a direct-fire roll.

When we stopped, I thought I needed more information. The whole movement was chaos. I went to look for someone who knew what to do. I was walking around speaking to people and heard the noise.

‘Whoosh’

It was a missile that had flown into the group and struck something. I don’t know what it hit. I began running at this moment back to my vehicle. More explosions began all around me and I thought it was too dangerous to run.

I rolled underneath of a tank and thought this would be a good place to wait. A part of me became even more afraid that the tank might move and grind me into the ground. I thought I should take that risk and stay under. If I heard the tank turn on I would try to move as quickly as I could somewhere else.

I stayed under my tank until it was over. There was a lot of smoke and it was just terrible. After the attack I was very upset. The entire duration of hostilities I never saw an enemy soldier, tank, airplane, or anything. It was very frustrating.”

- Davit Sahakyan. Armenian Armed Forces. Battle of Shusha. Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, 2020.