This marks the 11th edition of the draft exchanged by the two sides since they began their current negotiations more than two years ago.
Earlier on Tuesday, Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Paruyr Hovannisian said that Yerevan had sent proposals to Baku aimed at overcoming the remaining differences and signing the peace treaty. He said Armenia was now awaiting a response from Azerbaijan.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian had previously proposed that Armenia and Azerbaijan move forward with signing a peace treaty based on the parts of the draft both sides have already agreed upon, which he said constitutes roughly 80 percent of the document. He suggested that any remaining issues could be addressed later. However, Baku rejected this approach.
Speaking in parliament last week Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said that Yerevan and Baku were still negotiating “one or two wordings” of the potential treaty.
He expressed cautious optimism, suggesting that both sides could soon resolve their differences and finalize the peace deal. He, however, did not specify the exact issues under discussion.
Optimism regarding the possibility of Armenia and Azerbaijan signing a peace agreement in the near future grew after Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met in Kazan on the sidelines of the BRICS summit hosted by Russia last month.
Few details of the October 24 meeting were officially reported, but an ally of Pashinian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service last month that Yerevan was satisfied with the talks where some “tangible results” may have been achieved.
Pro-government lawmaker Hovik Aghazarian also confirmed that issues related to regional unblocking, and more specifically to the restoration of cargo transportation, were also addressed at the Kazan talks.
Armenia and Azerbaijan engaged in fence-mending talks following a deadly war in 2020 over Nagorno-Karabakh, during which Baku regained control of much of the breakaway region. Azerbaijan completed its takeover of the region in 2023 when more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled hostilities and resettled in Armenia.
The United States and other Western partners of Armenia and Azerbaijan have repeatedly expressed their support for a peace treaty between the two South Caucasus nations, encouraging them to finalize it already this year.
Most of the recent progress in the Armenian-Azerbaijani settlement process – including the release of a group of Armenian detainees and the demarcation of a section of the border – came as a result of direct talks between the two sides.
Meanwhile, Russia, which has mediated Armenian-Azerbaijani talks for years and admittedly has vested geopolitical interests in the South Caucasus, has warned against what its foreign minister described as a “hasty peace.” In remarks quoted by Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday, Sergey Lavrov claimed that “unlike Western pseudo-mediators, we are not pushing our partners to hastily conclude a peace treaty.”
“A hasty peace without a comprehensive consideration of the positions of Baku and Yerevan, as well as the realities on the ground, will not lead to anything good. On the contrary, it will create additional risks of tensions and potential escalation of the conflict,” Lavrov said.
Receiving credentials from newly appointed foreign ambassadors, including Armenia’s ambassador Gurgen Arsenian, at the Kremlin today, Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to his press office, also emphasized that “we [Russia] have done and are doing everything for achieving the normalization of Azerbaijani-Armenian relations and ensuring lasting peace in the Trans-Caucasus.”