The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that the EU has nothing to offer the conflicting sides as European Council President Charles Michel hosted fresh talks between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Brussels. It was their third meeting in five months.
“We see that the EU’s activity in the South Caucasus is determined by geopolitical ambitions,” said Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. “In our opinion, this basically has nothing to do with a real desire to facilitate the normalization of Azerbaijani-Armenian relations.”
“I would say that these are pseudo-initiatives of the Europeans,” she told a news briefing in Moscow. “They are more like an attempt to shamelessly appropriate the laurels of mediation [from Russia,] which is not backed up by anything.”
“We, as mediators, are working, and this work brings concrete results and is assessed accordingly by the parties. As for those who pretend to be mediators while not being intermediaries, apparently they are just not capable of offering anything,”
Moscow has repeatedly deplore the EU’s mediation efforts before, saying that they are part of the West’s attempts to hijack Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks and use the Karabakh conflict in the standoff over Ukraine. A senior EU diplomat insisted in June that the 27-nation bloc is not competing with Russia in its pursuit of the conflict’s “comprehensive settlement.”
Michel held his latest trilateral meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev the day after senior Armenian and Azerbaijani officials met in Moscow for the second round of negotiations on demarcating the border between the two South Caucasus states. Russian officials led by Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk also participated in the talks.
Overchuk and his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts also co-head a trilateral commission dealing with practical modalities of establishing Armenian-Azerbaijani transport links in line with a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the 2020 war in Karabakh.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that the commission has made “substantial” progress towards reaching concrete agreements. “I hope that they will be formalized very soon,” he said.