Aliyev and Pashinian held a trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on November 26 before meeting twice in Brussels last week. The Brussels talks were organized by European Council President Charles Michel and French President Emmanuel Macron.
“I want to point out that after the meetings in Sochi and Brussels I see an opportunity for us to move step by step along the path of opening an era of peaceful development for our country and the region,” said Pashinian.
“At least the government of Armenia will do everything in its power to achieve progress in this direction,” he told senior officials of the country’s National Security Service (NSS).
Pashinian did not go into details of the talks. He said the NSS will have to cope with more serious challenges “in this new environment” but did not elaborate.
The first Aliyev-Pashinian meeting in Brussels lasted for than four hours. Michel said afterwards that the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders pledged to de-escalate tensions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and restore rail links between the two South Caucasus. But he admitted that they failed to patch up their differences on the status of a highway that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave via Armenia’s southeastern Syunik province.
Speaking just a few hours before the December 14 meeting, Aliyev said people and cargo passing through that “Zangezur corridor” must be exempt from Armenian border controls. Pashinian swiftly rejected the demand, saying that it runs counter to Armenian-Azerbaijani understandings reached with Russian mediation.
Aliyev described the talks as “productive” before meeting with Pashinian again on December 15.