Armenia's Foreign Ministry has signaled its readiness to “reengage" in peace negotiations with Azerbaijan following an offer of direct talks from Baku.
On November 21, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry called for direct negotiations with Armenia at a “mutually acceptable” venue, including along the state border between the two Caucasus neighbors.
In response, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on November 22 that Yerevan is ready to reengage in negotiations on the condition they are based on the three key principles that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said were agreed upon in Western-mediated negotiations in 2022 and 2023.
The conditions, the Foreign Ministry said, are “mutual recognition and respect for each other’s territorial integrity without ambiguities; completion of border delimitation based on the [1991] Alma-Ata Declaration; and the unblocking of the region’s trade, transportation, and communications based on full respect for sovereignty, jurisdiction, reciprocity, and equality between states.”
Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had several rounds of peace talks under EU mediation before Baku launched a lightning offensive in September that ended three decades of rule by ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Azerbaijan has indicated in recent days that it rejected France and the United States as mediators because of their “pro-Armenian” bias.
Azerbaijan refused to attend a meeting with Armenia at the foreign minister level in Washington that had been scheduled for November 20 after allegedly “one-sided and biased” remarks were made by a senior U.S. official during a congressional hearing on Nagorno-Karabakh.
Hikmet Hajiyev, assistant to the Azerbaijani president, said Armenia “must understand that the roots of peace are here, and not in Washington, Brussels, and Paris.”
EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus Toivo Klaar told RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service on November 20 that Brussels is looking for “rapid steps” toward the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“It's important is to move from the current state of absence of fighting to actual normalization," Klaaar said, adding that it would imply the signing of a peace treaty, the opening of communications, the delimitation of the border, and the distancing of military forces on both sides.