Harutyunyan was born in Stepanakert, then capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, part of the Azerbaijani SSR, then Soviet Union, in 1973. He attended Yerevan State Institute of Economy in 1990 and two years after, in 1992, joined the self-defence forces of Nagorno-Karabakh and took part in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. After the war, he moved from Yerevan State Institute of Economy to Artsakh State University Faculty of Economics and graduated in 1995. Three years later, in 1998, he finished his post-graduate course at Artsakh State University.