Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanian did not disclose them in comments to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan spoke last month of a “significant regression” in Azerbaijan’s position on the treaty. In particular, he indicated that Baku is reluctant to explicitly recognize Armenia’s borders through such an accord.
Senior Azerbaijani officials have said in recent months that the two sides should sign the treaty before agreeing on the delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Armenian analysts and opposition figures suggested that Baku wants to leave the door open for territorial claims to Armenia.
The Armenian government accused Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev of making such claims after he renewed in early January his demands for Armenia to withdraw from “eight Azerbaijani villages” and open an extraterritorial corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave. Aliyev also rejected Yerevan’s insistence on using the most recent Soviet military maps to delimit the long border between the two South Caucasus countries.
Armen Grigorian, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, said on Wednesday that the “regression” remained in the latest Azerbaijani proposals received by Yerevan this month. It applies to key provisions of the would-be treaty, he said without elaborating.
Grigorian insisted at the same time that the two sides could narrow their differences during Mirzoyan’s upcoming talks with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov.
Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian reached an agreement on the talks when they met in Munich last Saturday. No date has been set for them yet.