Azerbaijan and Armenia are living in a genuine peace and restoring trade ties that had been affected by intermittent conflict for almost 40 years, a senior official in Azerbaijan’s presidential administration said on Thursday.
Assistant to President Ilham Aliyev and head of the presidential foreign policy department, Hikmet Hajiyev, added that Baku will not sign a final peace treaty until Armenia formally strips ‘territorial claims’ from its constitution.
Hajiyev was speaking on the sidelines of the 4th Shusha Global Media Forum, a two-day event devoted to “The Mission of the Media in Promoting Peace: Restoring Truth and Rebuilding Trust,” attended by some 160 media professionals and government representatives from 53 countries.
“We are living in conditions of real peace. For Azerbaijan and Armenia, peace is not just something written on paper or contained in a declaration — it is a reality,” Hajiyev said, pointing to increased supplies of Azerbaijani oil products to Armenia as tangible proof of progress.
The South Caucasus neighbors had been at intermittent war since the late 1980s, mostly over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, before reaching a preliminary US-brokered peace agreement last August.
Starting from that time, Azerbaijan has ended its decades-long sanctions on Armenia and in October 2025, for the first time, Baku started exporting fuel and grain to Armenia through its territory as well.
However, despite this prospect, Hajiyev made it clear that there was a red line with regards to the constitutional issue.
“The form of constitutional changes is Armenia’s internal matter,” he said. “What is important for Azerbaijan is that the provisions we regard as territorial claims against our country are formally removed, whether through the adoption of a new constitution or another legal mechanism. Once that issue is resolved, we believe there will be no obstacles to signing the final peace agreement.”
The stumbling block for Baku is the preamble to Armenia’s constitution that mentions a Soviet-era document calling for the reunification of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory it regained in a blistering campaign in 2023, which displaced some 100,000 ethnic Armenians.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has suggested that he will proceed with constitutional changes using a referendum, which is planned to be held in 2027, but his party does not have a constitutional majority to commence a constitutional change unilaterally.
Hajiyev reiterated that the signing ceremony could not be sealed with just a draft constitution. On parallel infrastructure, Hajiyev said the Azeris have been given “serious and positive signals” by Washington to start construction work on the proposed 43-kilometre Azerbaijani segment of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) that would connect Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave and Turkey by end of 2026, noting that the Azeri side is already implementing the project.
https://thediplomaticinsight.com/azerbaijan-fp-head-at-real-peace-armenia/
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