Armenia's foreign minister on September 13 said his country has received "new proposals" on a potential peace deal from bitter rival Baku, hours after his Azerbaijani counterpart said Baku was prepared to allow the Red Cross to transport humanitarian aid into Nagorno-Karabakh on a regular basis.
"We sent our proposals to Azerbaijan," Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan told the Caucasus nation's parliament. "Literally, yesterday we received new proposals from the Azerbaijani side. There is a process. There is a discussion."
He cautioned, however, that "unfortunately, there are essential issues where the positions of the parties are still quite far from each other."
Mirzoyan did not provide details on the potential proposals by either side and Baku did not immediately comment on the report.
Separately, Russia's TASS news agency quoted Mirzoyan as saying the leaders of the two countries planned to meet in next month in Spain, although it wasn’t immediately clear if an actual meeting has been set up or if he was referring to a previous proposal by European Council President Charles Michel.
Hours earlier, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Ceyhun Bayramov said Baku was prepared to allow the Red Cross to transport humanitarian aid into Nagorno-Karabakh region on a regular basis, but he accused the Armenia-backed breakaway region's de facto leaders of blocking access.
Bayramov told reporters at UN headquarters in Geneva that he had held talks with the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Swiss city and reached agreements on cooperation in a bid to ease tensions between Baku and Yerevan.
Armenia has accused Azerbaijan of blocking the Lachin Corridor -- the sole road linking Armenia to mainly ethnic Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh -- since December 2022, while Azerbaijan has insisted that aid trucks should go through Azerbaijani territory to ensure no contraband was being shipped.
"The ICRC is ready. The government of Azerbaijan is ready," Bayramov said, adding that the only problem is what he called the "blocking" of the routes by Nagorno-Karabakh's leaders.
Bayramov's statement comes a day after a Russian truck carrying humanitarian aid arrived in the region via Azerbaijan's territory, the first vehicle to do so in more than three decades.
Four days ago, Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan announced a deal that would allow aid deliveries to the breakaway region amid warnings from international aid groups of dire shortages of food and medicine in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh authorities agreed to allow Russian-provided aid to be delivered directly from Azerbaijani territory via the Agdam road, while in return Azerbaijani authorities agreed to allow aid deliveries to the breakaway region through the 6-kilometer-long mountain corridor that hooks up with Armenian territory.
Baku has pressed for its Agdam route to be used for aid deliveries instead of the blocked Lachin Corridor from Armenian territory. Nagorno-Karabakh officials, however, have claimed it is an effort by Baku to control aid shipments and reestablish authority over the region while taking it away from ethnic Armenian leaders.
Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan and is currently populated by around 120,000 ethnic Armenians. It broke from Baku's hold in a war as the Soviet Union collapsed and for decades survived with direct support from Armenia thanks to control of a land link, the Lachin Corridor.
A second war in 2020 saw Azerbaijan reconquer territory in and around the mountainous region and Armenia lost control of the corridor, leaving the road policed by Russian peacekeepers until it was blocked last December.