Armenia’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said it was ready to “re-engage” in talks with Azerbaijan, a day after Baku called for direct — one-on-one — peace negotiations with Yerevan. At the same time, a senior member of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s party said that Yerevan is inclined to continue talks with Baku through the European Union’s mediation efforts.
In calling for direct talks with Armenia, Baku also said the meetings can be held on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border.
In its statement on Wednesday, Armenia’s foreign ministry stressed that official Yerevan is ready to re-engage in negotiations, having as a basis “mutual recognition and respect for each other’s territorial integrity without ambiguities, implementation of the further border delimitation based on the [1991] Alma-Ata Declaration and the latest legitimate Soviet maps, the unblocking of the region’s infrastructures based on the principles of full respect for the sovereignty, jurisdiction, reciprocity and equality of the states.”
It said that “despite all the complications and challenges” official Yerevan sees “a real possibility of establishing peace between the two countries, which can be realized if there is political will on both sides, and the Armenian side has that will.”
Armenia’s foreign ministry challenged Baku saying “one of the expressions of this will is also the fact that Armenia proposed to Azerbaijan to hold a meeting of border delimitation commissions on the state frontier between the two countries.”
Azerbaijan has been avoiding Western-mediated talks and backed out of two scheduled meetings, one in Washington this week and another in Granada, Spain last month.
“Those five-way [Granada] and three-way [Washington] meetings had previously been agreed upon, and Yerevan considered it to be more efficient to present [its latest proposals] to Azerbaijan during those meetings,” Armenia’s foreign ministry said.
“Nevertheless, in order to prevent attempts to deadlock the negotiation process and achieve lasting peace in our region, the Republic of Armenia constructively conveyed its observations on the [draft] agreement,” the statement said.
The foreign ministry announced on Tuesday that it had submitted it sixth draft of proposals on a peace deal to Baku.
Sargis Khandanyan, who represents Pashinyan’s Civil Contract faction and heads the parliament’s Foreign Relations Commission, told Azatutyun.am’s Armenian Service Wednesday that the main principles for Armenian-Azerbaijani normalization were agreed upon by the parties in July when the latest round of EU-mediated talks was held between Pashinyan 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,” Khandanyan said.
“But we saw that Azerbaijan rejected both meetings that were scheduled in Granada and Brussels. Nevertheless, Armenia continues to adhere to this logic and wants to achieve settlement within this framework,” Khandanyan added.