Azerbaijan and Armenia held a fresh round of EU-mediated peace talks Saturday, while Russia offered a summit in Moscow in a bid to reassert its lead role in the normalisation process.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met in Brussels for talks aimed at resolving their decades-long conflict for the control of Armenian-populated Karabakh. European Council President Charles Michel, who mediated the discussions, said the exchanges were “frank, honest and substantive”.
“I encouraged them to take courageous steps to ensure decisive and irreversible progress on a normalisation track,” he added.
Michel said he intended to organise a fresh meeting between Aliyev and Pashinyan in Brussels and another in Spain in October involving German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.
The talks come amid renewed tensions after Azerbaijan closed the sole land link between Karabakh and Armenia on Tuesday.
Baku and Yerevan have been trying to negotiate a peace deal with the help of the European Union and United States, whose growing diplomatic engagement in the Caucasus has irked traditional regional power broker Russia.
Moscow on Saturday offered to host the two countries’ foreign ministers and suggested the future peace treaty could be signed in Moscow.
Russia is ready “to organise a trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers in Moscow in the near future”, the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
It also urged Azerbaijan to reopen the Lachin Corridor and said Armenia’s recent recognition of Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan “has radically changed the standing of the Russian peacekeeping contingent”.—INP
