The decision made by the foreign ministers of EU member states at a meeting in Brussels was announced by Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, late on Monday.
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as French President Emmanuel Macron and EU chief Charles Michel reached an agreement on the mission at an October 6 meeting in Prague. It came three weeks after large-scale border clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces left more than 300 soldiers dead.
French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said as recently on December 6 that the 40 or so civilian monitors deployed by the EU to the Armenian side of the border have “really limited the risk of escalation” and should continue their work “as long as it is needed.”
However, Borrell made clear that the mission will end as planned on December 19. He gave no reasons for the 27-nation bloc’s decision not to extend it.
It is not clear whether the Armenian government requested such an extension. Senior Armenian officials last week praised the monitors but did not clarify whether Yerevan asked the EU to keep them deployed longer than was originally planned.
Tensions along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and the “line of contact” in and around Nagorno-Karabakh have remained high since September, with the conflicting sides regularly accusing each other of violating the ceasefire. The monitoring team’s reactions to the truce violations remain unknown.
In an October statement, the EU’s European External Action Service (EEAS) said that the team “will not have an investigative role” and instead “will report on military posture and ceasefire related developments” in Armenia’s border regions. Nor will the monitors “draw conclusions of a political nature on the basis of their findings,” added the EEAS.