The foreign ministers of the two countries concluded late on Thursday a new round of U.S.-mediated negotiations held in and outside Washington. The Foreign Ministry said they agreed on more articles of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty but did not iron out their differences on “some key issues.”
The ministry spokeswoman, Ani Badalian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that those issues include the border delimitation, troop disengagement and how to “properly address the rights and security of the Nagorno-Karabakh people under an international mechanism.”
Yerevan says that such a mechanism is essential for protecting Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov made clear late last week that Baku will not agree to any special security arrangements for the Karabakh Armenians.
Also, the Armenian side wants to use 1975 Soviet maps as a basis for delimiting the long border. Baku has opposed the idea so far. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry emphasized earlier this month that Azerbaijan has demarcated its borders with other neighboring states “on the basis of analyses and examination of legally binding documents, rather than any specially chosen map.”
Tigran Grigorian, a Yerevan-based political analyst, said the parties’ failure to eliminate any of these sticking points means that they did not achieve a breakthrough during the three-day talks. The signing of the peace treaty is therefore still not on the cards, he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Speaking during the concluding session of the talks, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that despite “further progress” made by the two conflicting sides “there remains hard work to be done to try to reach a final agreement.”
“I think there is also a clear understanding on everyone’s part that the closer you get to reaching agreement, in some cases the harder it gets by definition,” added Blinken.
One day after the start of the talks, four Karabakh Armenian soldiers were killed in Azerbaijani artillery and drone attacks on their positions, one of the deadliest ceasefire violations in Karabakh reported since the 2020 war.
“I think that Azerbaijan definitely used that escalation to try clinch some concessions from the Armenian side at the negotiating table,” said Grigorian. He claimed that Baku is seeking an agreement that would amount to Armenia’s “de facto capitulation.”