Blinken held the trilateral meeting with Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov during a session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday. According to virtually identical Armenian and Azerbaijani readouts of the talks, the ministers agreed to “put additional efforts towards the conclusion” of the peace treaty.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry has not yet clarified whether the two sides narrowed their differences.
Hovik Aghazarian, a senior member of the Armenian parliament representing the ruling Civil Contract party, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that they at least made no progress towards signing the kind of an agreement which Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian again advocated in a speech at the UN General Assembly delivered just a few hours after the New York talks.
Pashinian said that Yerevan and Baku should “take what has already been agreed,” sign an interim peace treaty and try to settle their remaining differences later. The Azerbaijani government has repeatedly rejected the idea.
It is not clear whether the United States backs the Armenian proposal. U.S. officials have made no public statements in support of it. In its readout of the New York talks, the U.S. State Department said Blinken “encouraged continued progress by both countries to finalize an agreement as soon as possible.”
“Pashinian’s proposal has not received support from any side,” Artur Khachatrian, a parliament deputy from the opposition Hayastan alliance, said on Monday.
Baku also makes the signing of a peace deal conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution which it says contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, reaffirmed this condition in an interview with Italy’s La Repubblica daily published on Friday.
“We need guarantees [by Armenia,]” Hajiyev said, adding that Armenia’s ongoing “militarization” is another obstacle to peace.
He also said: “The best solution for Armenia would be neutrality, not [membership in] military alliances that threaten Azerbaijan's security.”