The U.S. State Department spokesman, Ned Price, said last Wednesday that the EU’s top official, Charles Michel, is due to host such talks “in the coming days” in a bid to build on “significant progress” made by the conflicting parties in recent months.
“There are no specific dates,” Toivo Klaar, the EU’s special envoy to the South Caucasus, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Saturday. “But we are working on that and this is the reason why I’m here in Yerevan.”
Klaar confirmed that the EU hopes Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will meet again in Brussels soon.
“That is obviously the aspiration,” he said, citing the need to reinvigorate the “Brussels process.”
Michel held a series of trilateral meetings with Aliyev and Pashinian last year.
Klaar met with Pashinian on Friday. An Armenian government statement on the meeting, said the two men discussed, among other things, “the process of normalizing relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.” It said nothing about the Armenian-Azerbaijani talks planned by the EU.
Aliyev and Pashinian met in Munich as recently as on February 18 for talks organized by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. They reportedly concentrated on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty discussed by the two sides for the past year.
Aliyev spoke after the Munich summit of “progress” in Armenia’s position on the treaty which he hopes will help to restore full Azerbaijani control over Nagorno-Karabakh. He also expressed readiness to negotiate with the Karabakh Armenians over their “minority” rights.
Klaar said he is encouraged by Aliyev’s remarks. The EU supports “real dialogue between Baku and Stepanakert,” added the diplomat.