1. David Edgari Tonoyan is an Armenian political figure and former Defence Minister of Armenia, in office from 2018 to 2020.
10 Facts About David Tonoyan
1. 2.
David Tonoyan was born on 27 December 1967 in the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, in the East Kazakhstan Region of the Kazakh SSR.
3.
David Tonoyan is the grandson of Hovhannes Hakobov, a veteran of the Red Army who took part in the Second World War.
4.
David Tonoyan moved to Yerevan to attend Yerevan State University, which he graduated from in 1991.
5.
David Tonoyan entered the Armed Forces of Armenia in 1992.
6.
Between 1998 and 2007, Tonoyan held various positions at NATO's headquarters in Brussels, serving as the Armenian Representative to NATO for three years.
7.
In 2007, David Tonoyan returned to Armenia to head the departments on international military cooperation and defence policy in the Ministry of Defence.
8.
From 2010 to 2017, David Tonoyan served as First Deputy Minister of Defence of Armenia, serving under Seyran Ohanyan and Vigen Sargsyan.
9.
In March 2019, at a gathering of Armenian community representatives in New York, David Tonoyan declared that "I, as the Defence Minister, say that the option of return of 'territories for peace' will no longer exist, and I have re-formulated it into 'new territories in the event of a new war'", criticizing the Madrid Principles which envisioned the peaceful return of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani control.
10.
On 30 September 2021, David Tonoyan was arrested by the National Security Service of Armenia and accused of fraud and embezzlement causing nearly 2.3 billion Armenian drams worth of damage to the state together with arms dealer Davit Galstyan.