Spartak Stepanyan is trying to move by in some way attaching his foot to the main prosthesis. For seven months now, the 53-year-old man has been trying to hold his foot and main prosthesis together with a sock, pulling it up as much as possible. He also uses a cane to prevent him from falling and getting injured due to the broken prosthesis: he fell once and was taken to the hospital.

Spartak is from Artsakh. Until 2003, he lived in his birthplace, Martuni. After that, he moved and lived with his family in Stepanakert for 20 years. “I was injured in the 90s; I had a concussion; in 2003, during demining, I was blown up on a mine and lost one leg. The other one was somehow put back together. My prosthesis has been broken for seven months, I can’t cross the street. We live on the third floor, I’ve already fallen several times going up and down,” he says in an interview with Forrights.am, and putting the broken prosthesis aside, he shows his damaged left leg. Spartak is a 2nd-degree disabled military person. He applied to the RA Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs to replace his broken prosthesis with a new one. Until last week, all applications were rejected. He had to go to the government and complain, the ministry contacted him and promised to solve the problem. “I saw that there was no chance, so I went to the government and said I was going on a sit-in strike, and they called me from the Ministry of Social Affairs and said they would give me one in three days. Then they called me and said I had a problem with my passport, the deadline had passed. I applied for citizenship, but they haven’t given me a new passport yet,” he said, noting that he had already applied to the Republic of Armenia for citizenship.

Spartak went through a difficult ordeal on September 19. When the shooting started, he rushed to school after his 10-year-old son. “I don’t know how I got to school in this condition. I went into the basement of the school. There were a thousand children, parents were looking after their children, and finally I found my son. How we got home was undescribable; we lay on the ground several times on the way, because they were shooting, there were explosions nearby, my son was crying,” he tells of the difficulties of getting home from school.

After bringing his 10-year-old son home, Spartak began to think about his other son, who was on the front line at that moment. “I couldn’t go into the basement because I knew my other son was in the positions,” he says, noting that they had no news of his son in the positions for several days.

The boy was in the positions of the village of Khramort in the Askeran region. “I searched the hospital, among the wounded and corpses. It was a terrible situation. He was on the Askeran side, on the front line, and I knew that there was a fight going on near them, the posts had been attacked. They were bringing in wounded and dead special forces soldiers. I called, there was no connection. I wrote, “Hey, boy, write something,” but there was no connection.” On the third day, he finally got a call, his son said he was in a normal condition, there was no connection, so he could not call. On the third day, they came to Stepanakert. We heard that people were already leaving,” Spartak recalls and notes that after his son returned to Stepanakert, he continued his service in the capital, because there was a danger of the enemy entering the city.

“he called and said, ‘We are going to hold Stepanakert so that the enemy does not enter there.’ Then they went to Krkzhan; the enemy wanted to enter the city, they didn’t let. On September 25, he came home and said that the weapons have been handed over, we are leaving Artsakh.”

Spartak fought in Monte Melkonyan’s detachment in the 90s. “Monte came to Martuni for the first time in 92. He came to our wagon, got acquainted with us, and then became our commander. One day an enemy tank was coming at us, I grabbed the first a weapon near my hands and ran towards the tank. The crew abandoned the tank and fled. Avo [Monte] came and said, ‘What did you do?’ I said, ‘I know that I couldn’t do anything with that weapon, but I decided to attack anyway,’” he said.

Narek Kirakosyan

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