A senior EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity, has provided some details about the upcoming meeting of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian of Armenia and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan that a spokesman for Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said yesterday the two leaders had agreed to have on December 15.
“The goal is to bring Pashinian and Aliyev to the same table for confidence-building measures,” said the EU official.
On November 19, the EU announced that Michel had telephone conversations with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia about the situation in the region. As a result, it said, the two leaders agreed to meet on the sidelines of the EU’s Eastern Partnership summit.
“It is not clear yet how their Brussels meetings will look like, who of the EU leaders will sit, whether the defense ministers or foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan will be present,” the EU official told RFE/RL.
Michel’s office said Pashinian and Aliyev would meet “to discuss the regional situation and ways of overcoming tensions for a prosperous and stable South Caucasus, which the EU supports.” It said they also agreed to establish a direct communication line, at the level of defense ministers, “to serve as an incident prevention mechanism.”
The statement did not specify when such a line could become operational.
“The aim of the forthcoming talks is to establish some sort of trust between the two leaders via confidence building measures, especially in the field of connectivity,” the EU official said.
“We are talking here about transport corridors in Nagorno-Karabakh, transport projects involving both Armenia and Azerbaijan,” the source added.
The Russia-brokered ceasefire agreement that Armenia and Azerbaijan signed to put an end to six weeks of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh last November also referred to a new route for a connection between ethnic Armenians inside Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia that was understood to be approved within the next three years, with the agreement of the parties, after which Russian peacekeepers would be redeployed to protect that route. It has been a year since the signing of that trilateral statement, but so far nothing has been reported about any agreement reached between the parties.
The passing week has seen a further escalation of tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan that on November 16 had their worst fighting along their un-demarcated border since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
It was during that escalation that the president of the European Council had phone talks with Pashinian and Aliyev, calling for “urgent de-escalation and full respect of the ceasefire.”
According to the EU official who talked to RFE/RL, “Michel, Pashinian and Aliyev have built up quite a good rapport in the last couple of months, and Michel has spoken to them 4-6 times in the last couple of months.” Besides, according to RFE/RL’s source, Michel also speaks regularly with the presidents of Turkey and Russia.
In early November Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that a trilateral meeting of the leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan was being prepared in Moscow. Shortly after that announcement Armenia’s prime minister said that there was no agreement about any such meeting yet. It is still unclear whether Aliyev and Pashinian will have a tripartite meeting together with Russian President Vladimir Putin any time soon, or if they do, whether this meeting will be before or after their announced meeting in Brussels.
Confirming the news of the upcoming meeting in Brussels, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that Baku has repeatedly stated its position on the post-conflict situation in the region, including in the international arena.
“In this regard, we believe that the summit of the Eastern Partnership, and the meeting that will take place on the sidelines of this event will create additional opportunities,” Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Leyla Abdullayeva said.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry has also confirmed the news of the upcoming meeting, but has not provided any further comments on that yet.