On March 9, the office of Azerbaijan’s deputy prime minister, Shahin Mustafayev, issued a statement about the results of the meeting of the joint Armenian-Azerbaijani border demarcation and delimitation commission held on March 7. In that statement, Azerbaijan demanded the immediate return of four villages.
“Four villages that are under the occupation of Armenia and are not exclaves (Baganis Ayr, Aşagi Eskipara, Heyrimli, and Kizilhacili) unquestionably belong to Azerbaijan and should be returned immediately.
The press release from Mustafayev’s office also stated that the fate of the exclave/enclave villages will be decided in the future during the delimitation and demarcation process.
This statement reflects the disagreements in the recent negotiations between the parties regarding the border package. During the meetings of the delimitation and demarcation commissions, Armenia raises the issue of the return of territories (at least 215 square kilometers) occupied by Azerbaijan in different areas in 2021 and 2022.
In recent years, Azerbaijan has used a number of tricks to reject this demand from the Armenian side.
Baku first declared that the Armenia-Azerbaijan border is conditional and until it is delimited, it is impossible to understand who the territories occupied by Azerbaijani forces in 2021 and 2022 belong to. Of course, this is not a convincing argument, because Azerbaijani troops have made such advances in some areas that cannot be considered disputed by any map. For example, no one can question the fact that Jermuk belongs to Armenia. Azerbaijani forces occupied the outskirts of the town in September 2022.
The second Azerbaijani trick is that, instead of discussing the surface area of the territory controlled by both countries, Azerbaijan emphasizes the number of villages. Thus, the Azerbaijani side regularly insists on the need to return the eight villages under Armenia’s control. As it was, before Azerbaijan’s May 2021 invasion of Armenia’s sovereign territory, the areas controlled by the two countries within each other’s former administrative borders were almost equal.
It is clear that this propaganda trick by Azerbaijan is primarily aimed at the international community. Along with these statements, Baku emphasizes that during the escalations of 2021 and 2022, no Armenian villages came under its control.
These public disagreements between the parties on border issues have become the main problematic points in the recently intensified negotiations. It is obvious that Azerbaijan is not going to withdraw troops from the Armenian territories it occupied in 2021-2022 under any circumstances and is putting forward new demands to achieve this goal. During the last few months, the most important of these demands was the return of those four non-enclave villages. In that regard, Mustafaev’s office just publicized the demand that was presented to the Armenian side during the last round of negotiations.
It is noteworthy that some time ago, the Armenian side also changed its narrative regarding the occupied territories of Armenia, emphasizing the number of villages whose administrative territories are occupied by Azerbaijan.
On January 13, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced at a Civil Contract party meeting in the Gegharkunik region that Azerbaijan raises the issues of four villages, and Armenia raises the issues of 32 villages whose adjacent territories are occupied, including in the Gegharkunik region. “Since we are committed to mutual recognition of each other’s territorial integrity based on the Alma-Ata Declaration, we say that there should be no occupied territories between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Therefore, where it turns out that Armenia controls some territories that ‘de jure’ belong to Azerbaijan, Armenia must withdraw, and Azerbaijan must withdraw from those territories that ‘de jure’ belong to Armenia but are under Azerbaijan’s control,” Pashinyan said.
We can conclude from Pashinyan’s statement that Armenia is not opposed in principle to giving up those four villages mentioned by Azerbaijan, if Baku, in turn, agrees to withdraw its troops from the territories occupied in 2021 and 2022. However, Azerbaijan is not going to withdraw its armed forces from the sovereign territory of Armenia. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev also stated this directly in his interview with Azerbaijani media at the beginning of January.
With the statement regarding these four villages, Azerbaijan is most likely trying to put pressure on Armenia and leave the discussion of the withdrawal of its troops from the occupied territories of Armenia for the future. In other words, Baku is aiming to sign a peace agreement without reaching any clarity on these border issues, which corresponds to the Azerbaijani vision of establishing a “victor’s peace” in the region.
