EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the Crisis in Georgia Toivo Klaar wrote on Twitter about “good and substantive discussions today” with Armen Grigorian, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, and Hikmet Hajiyev, a foreign-policy advisor to the president of Azerbaijan, “on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations and EU engagement.”
Klaar did not report any details of the discussions, but posted a photograph showing the Armenian and Azerbaijani officials during the discussions mediated by him and other EU representatives.
There was no immediate report or comment by officials in Yerevan and Baku about the meeting.
Grigorian and Hajiyev last met in Brussels in May and, as Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on June 27, had also been supposed to meet the following month, but the Azerbaijani side, he said, canceled the scheduled meeting.
The EU special representative visited Yerevan and Baku in mid-July in an apparent attempt to reschedule and organize a new meeting.
Yerevan-based political analyst Beniamin Poghosian suggested in an interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian Service last month that a new Grigorian-Hajiyev meeting may precede another meeting in Brussels between Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
This is the first meeting of senior Armenian and Azerbaijani representatives after the latest escalation of violence in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone in early August when at least one Azerbaijani and two Armenian soldiers were killed. The two sides blamed each other for the violence.