“We hope that our U.S. partners will make sufficient efforts and maybe also put pressure on Azerbaijan so that negotiations continue in Washington,” said Sargis Khandanian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on foreign relations.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to host talks between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers in Washington on November 20. However, the Azerbaijani side cancelled them in protest against what it called pro-Armenian statements made by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.
O’Brien visited Baku and met with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov earlier this week. He said he told them that Blinken still “looks forward to hosting” the top Armenian and Azerbaijani diplomats soon. It is not yet clear whether he reached with them any agreements to that effect.
In what may have been a related development, a U.S. special envoy for the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace talks, Louis Bono, met with Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan in Yerevan on Thursday. The Armenian Foreign Ministry said Mirzoyan reaffirmed his readiness to meet with Bayramov in the U.S. capital.
His meeting with Bono coincided with the announcement of an Armenian-Azerbaijani agreement to exchange prisoners and take other confidence-building measures. The United States and the European Union were quick to welcome the deal. They said they hope that it will facilitate an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty sought by them.
Khandanian cautioned, however, that implications of the prisoner swap, agreed as a result of direct contacts between Baku and Yerevan, should not be overestimated. The two sides have only solved a “humanitarian issue” and it remains be seen whether they can make similar progress on other fronts, he said.
In recent weeks, Baku has repeatedly accused the Western powers of pro-Armenian bias and proposed direct negotiations with Yerevan.