The announcement came after Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry called on November 21 for direct negotiations with Armenia in a “mutually acceptable” venue, including at the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
Responding to that call, the Armenian side reaffirmed Yerevan’s readiness to “re-engage in negotiations” with Baku to establish peace between the two South Caucasus nations and mentioned a possible meeting at the state frontier of Armenian and Azerbaijani members of commissions involved in border delimitation and demarcation processes, something that it said Yerevan had already proposed earlier.
The Armenian ministry stopped short, however, of mentioning the possibility of direct Armenian-Azerbaijani talks at the highest level.
The commissions headed by the deputy prime ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Mher Grigorian and Shahin Mustafayev, already have the experience of negotiating at the border. The first such meeting took place in May 2022 followed by another in July of this year.
An ally of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in the Armenian parliament told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Wednesday that Yerevan was still “inclined” to hold negotiations with Baku at the level of the two countries’ leaders through the mediation of the European Union, in particular, of President of the European Council Charles Michel.
Sargis Khandanian, who represents the pro-government Civil Contract faction and heads the Armenian National Assembly’s Foreign Relations Commission, explained that such negotiations would be based on the main principles for Armenian-Azerbaijani normalization, including mutual recognition of territorial integrity and borders based on a 1991 declaration signed by a dozen former Soviet republics, including Armenia and Azerbaijan, after the collapse of the USSR, and the sovereign jurisdictions of the states over transportation links passing through their territories, that he said were agreed upon by the parties in July when the latest round of EU-mediated talks was held between Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
“Based on this logic, it is necessary to ensure the continuity of those negotiations and continue meetings at the level of the countries’ leaders through the mediation of the European Union, in particular, European Council President Charles Michel,” Khandanian said.
Aliyev appears to have avoided Western platforms for negotiations with Armenia after Azerbaijani forces recaptured the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh in a one-day military operation in September, causing more than 100,000 people, virtually the entire local Armenian population, to flee to Armenia.