The leaders of the two South Caucasus states reached an agreement on that meeting during weekend talks in Munich hosted by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. They said the ministers will focus on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
“The parties are working out [a date for the meeting,]” Ani Badalian, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “In case of reaching a final agreement, we will inform you further.”
It remained unclear whether the upcoming negotiations will be direct or mediated by a third party.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to host his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts in Washington last November. Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov withdrew from the trilateral meeting in protest against what his office called pro-Armenian statements made by a senior U.S. diplomat. Washington afterwards failed to convince the Azerbaijani leadership to reschedule it.
Speaking three days before Saturday’s summit, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that Baku “doesn’t need mediators to normalize relations with Yerevan” and that the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict “should be removed from the international agenda.”
Yerevan has insisted on continued Western mediation. In the run-up to the Munich talks, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian accused Baku of walking away from understandings reached during his earlier encounters with Aliyev organized by the European Union. But he said on Sunday that both sides are “committed to those understandings” relating to the basic parameters of the peace treaty.
“A number of articles of the peace treaty have been agreed but a number of articles of fundamental importance have not yet been agreed, and efforts must be made in that direction,” said Pashinian.
