The Delicate Operation Of Svo Raf To Supply Armenia With Weapons

In the early 1990s, the Artsakh Liberation War began. Svo Raf – at that time one of the main criminal authorities of the post-Soviet space – could not ignore what was happening with his country and would repeatedly assist Armenia with food, clothing, and weapons.

Levon Soghomonyan in an interview with Sergey Galoyan, the author of books about Svo Raf, spoke about a whole special operation that he had carried out together with the thief in law in late 1990 to help the Armenians.

“Having lived more than a month in Moscow, I went to Yerevan where I stayed until November, after which I returned to Moscow. There, I got a job with one of my friends – his apartment was in the very center of Moscow.

Every day, huge trucks would drive into the yard and drive off the next morning. It seemed suspicious to us,” Soghomonyan recalled.

He and his companion noted that even in the most severe frosts, Azerbaijani guards would not leave these trucks. As it turned out, weapons were brought from Moscow to the Tula Arms Plant. These weapons would be loaded into the trucks at night and sent to Azerbaijan the next morning.

Soghomonyan with like-minded people and with the support of Svo Raf decided to take possession of these weapons and transfer them to Armenia.

The plan was simple – as soon as the weapons were in the trucks to be sent to Azerbaijan, the armed raiders would overpower the guards and steal the trucks. The hostages were planned to be sent to a cottage in the suburbs and kept there until the weapons reached Armenia.

On the appointed day, it happened – the fog helped the raiders get close to the guards, capture them, push them into a car, and drive the trucks with the guns to the place indicated by Svo Raf. At the location, the thief in law took over the transfer of weapons to Armenia and completed the task without problems.

According to the memoirs of Levon Soghomonyan, Svo Raf has carried out many other similarly “delicate” operations. Using his connections, Svo Raf has bypassed the blockade of Armenia and supplied food and clothing to Armenians.

It is interesting that the right-hand man of Svo Raf was an Azerbaijani Fikret Mageramov. It was rumored that through him, the thief in law has even managed to transfer 14 million rubles to the militia in Armenia… Be that as it may, Svo Raf did not leave his compatriots in trouble.

Baghdasaryan died in 1993 in Moscow at the Lefortovo jail.

Harutyun Harutyunyan