By Mark Dovich
Armenia has said it remains ready to “resume engagement” in peace talks with Azerbaijan after Baku indicated it wishes to replace Western-mediated efforts with “direct negotiations” with Yerevan.
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Wednesday it is willing to resume peace talks if they are “guided” by three principles Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly put forward.
Those are: mutual recognition of territorial integrity, recognition of former Soviet-era administrative boundaries as international borders, and recognition of states’ sovereignty over infrastructure projects located within their territories.
To that point, Armenia said the day before it had relayed its latest peace treaty proposal to Azerbaijan, without elaborating.
Earlier that day, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling for “direct negotiations” with Armenia at a “mutually acceptable venue,” including on the two countries’ undelimited border.
Meanwhile, a senior Azerbaijani official appeared to rule out any further talks mediated by the European Union or United States.
“Armenia must understand that the roots and seeds of peace are not in Washington, Brussels, or Paris, but here in the region,” Hikmet Hajiyev, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s foreign policy advisor, told reporters.
Since last month, Aliyev and his top diplomat have snubbed three rounds of scheduled peace talks, in Granada, Brussels, and Washington, charging that France and the United States are biased in Armenia’s favor and can no longer be considered neutral mediators.
Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Europe, with American support, has coordinated one track of Armenia-Azerbaijan peace talks, while Russia has overseen a separate track. So far, neither has made any discernible progress toward a peace deal.
Tigran Grigoryan, who heads the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, a Yerevan-based think tank, has argued Azerbaijan wishes to end mediated talks in an effort to secure as many concessions from Armenia as it can.
“Azerbaijan, having achieved its main goal of establishing control over and depopulating Nagorno-Karabakh, is continuing to move forward with its maximalist agenda,” Grigoryan wrote for CivilNet Monday.
“Moreover, there is a fairly high probability that Azerbaijan may initiate localized border escalations in the near future, with the aim of forcing Armenia to accept its preferred negotiation formats,” he warned.
