“We have repeatedly confirmed our readiness to provide a Moscow platform for further dialogue at the level of the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan on the issues of normalizing bilateral relations and signing a peace treaty,” Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin told reporters.
“This readiness of ours is unchanged. When we agree on the dates of such an event, we will announce it in a timely manner,” he said, according to Russian news agencies.
Moscow first made such an offer last month as it sought to sideline the West and regain the initiative in the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiation process. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman suggested recently that the talks between the Russian, Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers could pave the way for another summit of the leaders of the three nations. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed readiness on October 13 to host such a summit.
Armenia now seems to prefer Western mediation of the peace talks amid its unprecedented tensions with Russia. They deepened further after Moscow’s failure to prevent, stop or even condemn Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Lavrov held talks with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov but not Armenia’s Ararat Mirzoyan on the sidelines of a multilateral ministerial meeting in Tehran on October 23. Lavrov and Bayramov also twice spoke by phone in the following days. No such phone conversations were reported between the top Russian and Armenian diplomats.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev were scheduled to meet on the fringes of the European Union’s October 5 summit in Granada, Spain. Pashinian hoped that they will sign there a document laying out the main parameters of the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
However, Aliyev withdrew from the talks at the last minute. He also appears to have cancelled another meeting which EU Council President Charles Michel planned to host in Brussels later in October.
Visiting the Belgian capital on Friday, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, Armen Grigorian, expressed hope that the EU-mediated talks will take place “in the near future.” Yerevan, he said, is ready to “come to Brussels, reach the final point and sign the peace treaty.”