There is a clear disconnect between the ways Azerbainjai President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan talk about relations between their two countries. An analysis of 20 speeches delivered by the two leaders between late May and early November 2026, by IntelliNews‘ Lambda tool, reveals Pashinyan talks about peace with Azerbaijan more than four times as often as Aliyev, whose speeches repeatedly return to occupation and military victory.
IntelliNews Lambda analysed 10 speeches by each leader, with a total length of around 26,000 words apiece, finding that Pashinyan used the word peace and its derivatives 144 times. Aliyev used them 34 times, while words built on “occupation” appeared 56 times in his speeches. Pashinyan mentioned occupation twice.
There has been no deadly shooting on the border for more than two years. The countries initialled a peace treaty at the White House on August 8, 2025, and Azerbaijani fuel and Russian grain now cross into Armenia. Both leaders can therefore say the war is over, but their speeches tell different stories about what peace means.
For Pashinyan, it represents an escape from a ruinous national project and the foundation of a new Armenian state. For Aliyev, it is a settlement the victor chose to offer after taking “revenge on the battlefield”, accompanied by warnings to remain vigilant and rearm.
The treaty remains unsigned, pending constitutional changes in Armenia that the opposition in Yerevan has started calling “Aliyev’s constitution”.
“Today, when some foreign circles want to make a dove of peace out of the current leadership of Armenia, we remind them of this history every time,” Aliyev told the congress of his ruling New Azerbaijan Party on October 2.
“The page of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is closed, peace has been established, and it is right before your eyes, your life and everyday life,” Pashinyan said in an address marking the peace summit’s first anniversary on August 8.
A victor’s peace
Aliyev’s account of the conflict follows a consistent script. Armenia occupied around a fifth of Azerbaijan for 30 years and displaced nearly a million people; international organisations failed to resolve the dispute; Azerbaijan won the 44-day war in 2020 and forced Armenia to sign what he calls “an act of capitulation”.
Peace subsequently became an Azerbaijani initiative. “We initiated the peace agreement with Armenia,” he told a forum on intercultural dialogue in Baku on October 27.
“We will never forget the Khojaly genocide. But we must be able to look to the future. We took our revenge on the battlefield and that is enough,” he told the Islamic Development Bank’s annual meetings on June 18. “So, today, peace is a reality.”
Aliyev never names Pashinyan in the 10 speeches, referring instead to “the current Prime Minister of Armenia”. Nor does he credit Armenia with contributing to peace. At the party congress, he rejected the idea that Yerevan’s recognition of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity was an act of goodwill, arguing that its government had previously “made territorial claims against us”.
In the same speech, he said Azerbaijan had “also sealed peace with Armenia in the most prestigious place in the world, the White House”.
Peace is also his justification for maintaining military strength. Explaining why Azerbaijan must continue arming, Aliyev told the congress: “Our people have faced the ingratitude of the Armenians. They saw that we were a little hesitant, they saw that we had stumbled, they stabbed us in the back.”
Azerbaijan must be “10 times stronger than them every day”, he said, as the government set aside approximately AZN9bn ($5.3bn) for defence and security spending in its 2027 budget.
He also presents restraint as a choice. “If we had been carried away by emotions, today, probably, the third Arch of Victory would have been erected in the centre of Yerevan,” he said.
His assessment has shifted from “peace is a reality” in June to “this peace is still fragile, it needs to be protected and strengthened” in October. Azerbaijan has nevertheless continued supplying fuel and allowing transit to Armenia, while the two sides cooperate on missing persons and trade.
For international consumption
Aliyev’s rhetoric is not simply a case of adopting a hard line for domestic audiences and a conciliatory one for foreigners.
At domestic economic meetings on agriculture in May and mining in September, Armenia appeared only as the former occupier accused of cutting off water supplies and plundering natural resources. Neither speech mentioned peace.
At Baku Energy Week on June 1, addressing oil executives and investors, he said Azerbaijan had “completely defeated Armenia in just 44 days”. He presented the Washington summit as the legal basis for the Zangezur corridor, without mentioning peace or the American-backed name for the route, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).
His warmest speech came at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s SCO Plus meeting in Bishkek on September 1, the only one of the 10 to describe cooperation with Armenia as a present-day fact.
“Azerbaijan is now supplying oil products to Armenia and ensuring the transit of cargo from third countries,” he said, adding that the South Caucasus “is becoming a zone of peace”. He had met Pashinyan on the sidelines of the summit.
His harshest speech was also delivered to foreigners. At the October 15 summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Baku, Aliyev said Armenia’s current leadership had continued the “criminal policies” of its predecessors since 2018. He described the trials of former Karabakh separatist leaders in Baku as “an analogue of the Nuremberg Tribunal”, with “Armenian fascists” in the dock.
Without sanctions on Armenia, he said, Azerbaijan “would not have been forced to break the back of Armenian fascism on the battlefield”. It was also in this speech that he called the peace fragile.
Twelve days later, at the intercultural dialogue forum organised with the UN Alliance of Civilizations, he listed peace with Armenia among recent positives and presented Azerbaijan as a model of restraint: “our victory in a just war, the capitulation of the defeated side, and then stopping without moving forward”.
Muslim religious leaders visiting Baku on September 15 heard both sides of the message. Aliyev said the peace process was underway and would be long-term, but warned: “This memory will not allow us to be deceived by sweet words again.”
Peace as a done deal
Pashinyan’s message changes little between speeches. Peace was established on August 8, 2025, thanks in large part to US President Donald Trump; the treaty has been initialled and must be signed and ratified; the countries recognise their Soviet-era borders under the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration; and TRIPP will reopen regional transport routes.
“Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is an established fact,” he told CIS leaders on October 9. He also gave the only credit to Aliyev found in his 10 speeches: “with the support of the President of Azerbaijan and our international partners, we have achieved the impossible”.
Like Aliyev, he never names his counterpart. Unlike the Azerbaijani president, he rarely criticises the other side directly. At the UN General Assembly on September 24, he blamed pessimism about peace on “the use of conflicting rhetoric from time to time in certain circles of Armenia and Azerbaijan, sometimes at the official level”.
His closest approach to a direct complaint about Baku came in parliament on August 24, when he said “it is impossible to deny that Azerbaijan is very actively raising and even instrumentalising the topic of constitutional reforms”.
His August 8 anniversary address went furthest towards accommodating Azerbaijan. He urged both sides to abandon competing claims of return, placing the right of return of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians alongside Baku’s campaign for the return of Azerbaijanis to what it calls “Western Azerbaijan”, referring to present-day Armenia.
“I congratulate the people of Azerbaijan on the occasion of August 8. Finally, we have a day that calms us and not inflames us,” he said.
For foreign audiences, Pashinyan presents peace primarily as an economic opportunity. At the SCO meeting in September and the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council in October, he focused on transport, logistics and trade. His criticism at the latter gathering was directed at Russia over barriers to Armenian exports, not Azerbaijan. His independence day address on September 21 did not mention Azerbaijan.
The war party at home
Domestically, Pashinyan uses peace as a weapon against political opponents, whom he accuses of seeking a return to conflict.
The day after his Civil Contract party won the June 7 election with 49.7% of the vote, he told parliamentary committees that “the three-headed party of war has been defeated”. In August, he warned that opponents were “acting with the logic of destroying peace” under a patriotic cover.
Presenting the government’s 2026-2031 programme to parliament on August 24, he set out the thinking behind his “Real Armenia” concept: a state confined to its internationally recognised 29,743 sq km.
“We must stop looking for Armenia in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan must stop looking for Azerbaijan in Armenia,” he said, describing the Karabakh movement that dominated Armenian politics from the late 1980s as “nothing more than a project to nullify the statehood and future of Armenia”.
The proposed new constitution, he insisted, was “a purely Armenian agenda”, rather than a concession to Baku. He also warned that “there is nothing easier than destroying peace”.
His certainty is less pronounced when discussing the remaining obstacles. The 2025 summit did not mean Armenia had reached “the final destination on the path to realising the peace agenda”, he said on August 8, pointing to the unsigned treaty and unfinished border demarcation.
At a youth MaskOFF panel on November 7, he identified signing and ratifying the treaty as the biggest problem he needed to solve for the next generation. “Solving this problem is realistic, but quite complicated,” he said.
Waiting on a constitution
Practical steps since Washington have run ahead of the rhetoric. The OSCE wound up its Minsk Process by the end of November 2025. Azerbaijan lifted its restrictions on goods transiting its territory to Armenia in October that year, initially allowing Kazakh grain, while petrol and diesel deliveries followed from December.
Armenia made its first confirmed export to Azerbaijan, a shipment of aluminium foil, in September 2026. Pashinyan says 12 km of the border have been demarcated. When the leaders met in Abu Dhabi in February, Aliyev said the two countries were “learning to live in peace”.
TRIPP has progressed more slowly. Armenia’s parliament ratified the US-Armenian agreement on the route on October 28, but construction has been pushed back to 2027.
The broader treaty remains blocked by Baku’s demand that Armenia remove from its constitution’s preamble a reference to the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which cites the unification of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Aliyev’s aide Hikmet Hajiyev said in August that once the territorial claims were removed, “we see no problem in signing”. Aliyev has not raised the constitutional issue in his speeches since May, leaving the demand to his aides, but has continued to emphasise the history underpinning it.
Pashinyan needs six opposition votes in parliament to send a new constitution to a referendum. Opposition parties have lined up against the changes, and he has not ruled out an early election if he cannot secure their support.
Public opinion has shifted but remains a constraint. An International Republican Institute poll in March found that 80% of Armenians still regarded Azerbaijan as their country’s greatest threat, down from 87%.
Aliyev’s speeches provide ammunition for Pashinyan’s opponents. When Azerbaijan’s president describes Armenia’s current leadership as the heir to “criminal policies” and invokes “Armenian fascism”, it becomes harder for Pashinyan to argue that constitutional change is a purely domestic decision, or that peace is already irreversible.
Pashinyan has staked his government on peace being a fact. Aliyev presents it as a choice made by Azerbaijan, one that the country could make differently. Until the treaty is signed and ratified, the settlement must survive both versions of what peace means.
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