Azerbaijan has offered to hold direction negotiations with Armenia on a peace treaty at a mutually acceptable venue, including along the state border between the two countries.
“Azerbaijan is ready for direct bilateral negotiations with Armenia for the early conclusion of a peace agreement,” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry said on November 21. “We believe that the two countries should decide the future of their relations together.”
The statement also said the responsibility for the continuation of the peace process, including the choice of a mutually acceptable venue, “or the decision to meet at the state border,” lies with the two countries. It urged the Armenian side to “avoid new unnecessary delays.”
Yerevan has not responded to Azerbaijan’s offer.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol 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.
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.”
The statement from Baku on November 21 follows the announcement by Armenia’s Foreign Ministry that Yerevan submitted its sixth proposal on a peace agreement to Azerbaijan following Pashinian’s call on November 18 for “intensifying diplomatic efforts to achieve the signing of a peace treaty.”
Armenia “remains committed to concluding and signing a document on normalization of relations based on previously announced principles,” the Armenian Foreign Ministry said.
In recent public statements Pashinian urged the Azerbaijani leadership to publicly commit to the three key principles for achieving peace that he said were agreed upon by the parties during several rounds of Western-mediated negotiations in 2022 and 2023.
The principles are recognition of each other’s territorial integrity, the delimitation of the countries’ borders based on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration, and the opening of regional trade, transportation, and communications while respecting sovereign jurisdictions.
In an interview with RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service, Toivo Klaar, the EU’s Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia, said Brussels is looking for “rapid steps” toward the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Some member states are concerned that normalization is taking too long, Klaar said in the interview on November 20.
“We don’t see any reason why the process of normalization cannot be quicker. The fact that there is no fighting, the fact that there are no daily reports of shooting or selling on the border does not mean that the things are normal,” he said.
“What is important is to move from this present situation of absence of fighting to actual normalization, which means signing of the peace treaty, which means opening of communications, which means delimitation of the border and distancing of forces so that there is really a sense of security,” he said.
He added he believes that it is in Baku’s hands to demonstrate that the process can be fast and substantial.