Armenia and Azerbaijan announced on Thursday (April 7) to launch preparations for peace talks to resolve three decades of conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the scene of two wars, including one in 2020.
The decision was taken during a meeting organized on Wednesday in Brussels between the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, and the Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliev, under the mediation of the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
After their talks in Brussels, the two heads of state ordered their respective foreign ministers to “begin preparations for peace talks between the two countries”Armenian diplomacy announced in a statement on Thursday.
A “great progress”
“An agreement was reached during this meeting (…) to set up a bilateral commission on border delimitation issues”, and this commission will be responsible in particular for ensuring security and stability along it. For its part, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry announced that the future agreement would be based on “the basic principles proposed earlier by Azerbaijan”.
Charles Michel assured him that “President Aliyev and Prime Minister Pashinian have both expressed their willingness to move quickly towards a peace agreement”. The Kremlin welcomed a new “very positive”. His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, however, stressed that the process was going ” to take a lot of time “.
Olessia Vartanian, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, points out that the announcement marks “a great progress made by both countries”. This is “an important tangible step towards a peace agreement, achieved for the first time under the mediation of the European Union”echoed the Azerbaijani political analyst Mehman Aliev.
Rise in tensions at the end of March
Populated mainly by Armenians, the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, supported by Yerevan, seceded from Azerbaijan at the time of the collapse of the USSR, leading to a first war in the 1990s which caused the death of 30,000 people and hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani refugees.
In November 2020, a six-week conflict again pitted the two former Soviet republics against each other for control of the region. It ended with a ceasefire signed under Russian mediation. This war, which left 6,500 dead, ended in a heavy defeat for Armenia, and the latter had to surrender important territories that it had controlled since a first war from which it had emerged victorious, at the beginning of the 1990s.
Yerevan like Baku had expressed, in recent days, their desire to resume their diplomatic efforts after a new rise in tensions. At the end of March, Russia accused Azerbaijan of violating the ceasefire negotiated by Vladimir Putin to end the 2020 conflict. Under this agreement, a Russian peacekeeping force is deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh .
According to Moscow, the Azerbaijani army occupied a locality there and used attack drones. Armenia further accused Baku of shutting off gas in the region, preventing the population from heating despite wintery weather. Azerbaijan brushed off these accusations, claiming sovereignty over the region.
Tuesday evening, on the eve of the meeting between MM. Pashinian and Aliev, thousands of Armenians marched through the capital Yerevan to protest against possible concessions to Azerbaijan.