“We try not to focus on frustrations and are just continuing to do the work,” a department spokesman, Vedant Patel, told reporters on Thursday when asked about Washington’s failure to broker a settlement.
“This continues to be an area of vital importance to this administration and to the Secretary [of State Antony Blinken,] and we’ll continue to work at it till our last day in office,” said Patel. He did not shed light on further U.S. peace efforts.
Earlier this month, Blinken offered to organize more talks between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers on the sidelines of an OSCE meeting in Malta. The proposal was accepted by Yerevan but rejected by Baku. The latter reportedly said that it now opposes U.S. mediation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiation process because of the Biden administration’s “unfair and biased policy.”
In an interview with Russian state television publicized on Wednesday, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused the State Department of “sponsoring” Armenia. Aliyev also alleged U.S. arms supplies to Yerevan.
In separate letters sent to Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in October, Biden expressed readiness to “take bold initiatives that would help pave the way for peace.” A senior Biden administration official handed the letters to the two leaders almost one month after Blinken hosted Armenian-Azerbaijani talks in New York.
The Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers pledged during those talks to “put additional efforts” to finalize a bilateral peace treaty “in the shortest possible period.” The two sides do not seem to have moved closer to such a deal since then, with Baku setting multiple conditions for its signing.