“I must say that during that meeting we did not manage to register common positions on the most important issues preoccupying us,” Pashinian told members of the Armenian community in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok late on Wednesday. “We are talking, in particular, about the Karabakh problem.”
“On the other hand, Azerbaijan and Armenia express their desire to achieve peace,” he said after attending an economic forum in Vladivostok and holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin there.
In Pashinian’s words, the main stumbling block is Aliyev’s insistence that Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 war put an end to the Karabakh conflict.
“Our position and the international community’s position clearly doesn’t match Azerbaijan’s position,” he said.
European Council President Charles Michel said after the August 31 summit that Aliyev and Pashinian agreed to assign their foreign ministers to “meet within one month to work on draft texts” of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty sought by Baku.
Aliyev said, for his part, that the planned talks on the treaty will be based on five elements which the Azerbaijani side presented to Yerevan in March this year. Those include a mutual recognition of each other’s territorial integrity, something which Baku believes would uphold its sovereignty over Karabakh.
Aliyev expressed hope that a deal along these lines will be signed in the coming months. Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan responded by accusing Baku of misrepresenting the Brussels talks and seeking to “torpedo the peace process.”
A senior Armenian lawmaker representing the ruling Civil Contract party said earlier this week that the conflicting sides are still far apart on key parameters of a bilateral peace deal after a series of face-to-face negotiations between their leaders
Speaking at the Vladivostok forum, Pashinian warned that the continuing conflict in Ukraine could heighten tensions in the Karabakh conflict zone.
“We are worried about forces that think that Russia … is too busy with the Ukraine theme and that they can use this as opportune moment for destabilizing the situation,” he said in a clear reference to Azerbaijan.