Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had been scheduled to meet, together with European Council President Charles Michel and the leaders of Germany and France, on the fringes of the EU’s October 5 summit in Granada, Spain. However, Aliyev withdrew from the talks at the last minute, citing pro-Armenian statements made by French officials. Michel said afterwards that the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders will likely hold a trilateral meeting with him in Brussels later in October.
“We will not have a meeting by the end of October,” Toivo Klaar, the EU’s special envoy to the South Caucasus, told a conference in Yerevan.
Speaking via video link from Brussels, Klaar suggested that this is a “slight delay, rather than anything else.” There was not have enough time to organize the summit, he said, adding that the trilateral meeting should take place soon. But he gave no possible dates.
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said, meanwhile, that the two leaders will not meet in the coming days because Aliyev “did not find the time” to fly to Brussels.
“I hope that the problem was indeed to do with concrete dates and that a new date for the meeting will be agreed upon soon,” he said. “Armenia is ready to participate in that meeting. We remain committed to our peace agenda.”
“We have received no new proposals yet regarding [meeting] dates,” Mirzoyan added during a news conference.
Despite last month’s Azerbaijani military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh and Baku’s resulting takeover of the region, Pashinian hoped to sign a framework peace deal with Aliyev at Granada. The document would lay out the key parameters of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty discussed since the beginning of last year. One of the main sticking points in those talks has been a mechanism for delimiting the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
In a joint statement with Pashinian issued in Granada, Michel, French President Emmanuel and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz effectively backed the idea of using a 1975 Soviet military map for the border delimitation, which is advanced by Armenia. Azerbaijan continues to oppose it.
Klaar said that although the conflicting sides are “moving slowly” towards a peace accord, they will likely sign it in the near future.
Russia has been very critical of the EU mediation, saying that it is part of the West’s efforts to drive Moscow out of the South Caucasus. Yerevan appears to prefer Western peace efforts now amid a continuing deterioration of Russian-Armenian relations.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov but not Mirzoyan on the sidelines of a multilateral meeting of the top diplomats of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia and Turkey held in Tehran on Monday. Lavrov also phoned Bayramov the following day. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the two men “reaffirmed the need to step up efforts to normalize relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan” on the basis of agreements brokered by Moscow.