In a Thursday post on Facebook the embassy showed photographs of the French ambassador to Armenia hiking in the mountains, writing: “French Ambassador Olivier Decottignies on the slope of Mount Tezhkar, a strategic point in Armenian territory, on the border with Azerbaijan (Nakhichevan). France is particularly vigilant about the territorial integrity of Armenia and respect for its 1991 borders reiterated in the Prague Declaration.”
By referring to the 1991 borders, France implies the Almaty Declaration that was signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan and 10 other former Soviet republics in December 1991 after the collapse of the USSR.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev issued a joint statement following their quadrilateral meeting in Prague on October 6, 2022 with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Council President Charles Michel, confirming their commitment to the Charter of the United Nations and the Alma-Ata 1991 Declaration through which both Armenia and Azerbaijan recognize each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
During his visit to Tbilisi, Georgia, last month Pashinian stressed that the key meaning of that Alma-Ata Declaration is that the administrative borders that existed between the republics of the Soviet Union at the moment of the USSR’s collapse become state borders.
“We hope to sign a peace agreement with Azerbaijan in the coming months and restore relations based on these principles,” Pashinian said.
In his public statements on several occasions Azerbaijani leader Aliyev has said that his country has territorial claims to Armenia. But he has so far declined to recognize the integrity of Armenian territory in numerical terms, something that Pashinian has done repeatedly.
Pashinian has said that Azerbaijan’s narrative about what Armenia perceives as a demand for an extraterritorial land corridor to its western exclave of Nakhichevan and continued talk about “Western Azerbaijan”, suggesting that Azeris who left Armenia at the start of the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in the late 1980s had lived in their “historical lands,” shows that Azerbaijan is “preparing a new war against the Republic of Armenia.”
Azerbaijan has denied any aggressive plans against Armenian territory, condemning France for its supply of weapons to Armenia under a recent military cooperation agreement signed between the two countries.
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