Azeri and Armenian Leaders Meet on Nagorno-Karabakh. The leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia met on Sunday in Brussels to discuss a peace plan for Nagorno-Karabakh that has stoked a wave of protests in Yerevan over opposition claims that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is being too soft.
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A simmering dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan flared into a six-week war in 2020.
Azeri troops drove ethnic Armenian forces out of swathes of territory they had controlled since the 1990s in and around Nagorno-Karabakh before Russia brokered a ceasefire.
European Council President Charles Michel held bilateral talks with both Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Pashinyan before they had a trilateral meeting at which Karabakh was discussed.
Baku said Aliyev told Michel "that Azerbaijan had laid out five principles based on international law for the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan and for the signing of a peace agreement."
"The president expressed his hope that the process of drafting the peace agreement between the two countries would be accelerated," the Azeri presidential office said in a statement.
Armenia's Pashinyan discussed with Michel the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh, humanitarian issues and stressed the need to resolve them, the Armenian prime minister's office said.
But Pashinyan is under pressure at home from opponents who say he mishandled the 2020 war and claim his recent public statements indicate he is giving up too much to Azerbaijan.
Pashinyan has faced a series of protests over recent weeks in Yerevan since he said the international community wanted Armenia to "lower the bar" on its claims to Nagorno-Karabakh.
The unrest also coincides with Russia's war in Ukraine, which has prompted many former Soviet neighbours to reassess their own security just as Moscow is preoccupied with the biggest confrontation with the West for generations.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held “significant” EU-mediated talks in Brussels, European Council President Charles Michel said.
The trilateral meeting lasted more than four hours, stretching into the early morning of December 15 as the neighbors discussed ways to overcome tensions and advance diplomacy following last year’s war, Michel said following the talks.
In autumn 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a six-week war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The conflict claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended with a Russian-brokered cease-fire under which Armenian forces ceded territories they had controlled for decades to Azerbaijan.
Since then, there have been repeated deadly border skirmishes.
The flare-ups in violence have renewed international calls for the two neighbors to engage in a process of delimitating and demarcating their Soviet-era border, as well as reaching a broader agreement to bring stability to the South Caucasus region.
Aliyev and Pashinian agreed that “further tangible steps” need to be taken to reduce tensions and create a conducive atmosphere ahead of planned delimitation and demarcation talks, the European Council said in a statement.
Michel reassured both leaders of the EU’s commitment to work closely with Armenia and Azerbaijan “in overcoming conflict, creating cooperation and an atmosphere of trust, with a view to sustainable peace in the region ultimately underpinned by a comprehensive peace agreement,” the statement added.
In a possible breakthrough, Michel said Armenia and Azerbaijan had also agreed to begin a process to potentially restore communications infrastructure between the two countries, including a rail link with border and customs controls.
The meeting was the fifth face-to-face talks between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan since last year’s war. The last direct talks were mediated by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on November 26.
Michel has been leading the EU’s diplomacy in the South Caucasus.
After phone calls with Michel last month, the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders agreed to establish a direct communication line, at the level of their respective ministers of defense, to serve as an incident-prevention mechanism.
In last year's war, Baku gained control of parts of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as adjacent territories that had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since the end of a separatist war in 1994. Some 2,000 Russian troops were deployed to monitor the cease-fire.
