Author: Ophelia Vardapetian

The next 3+3 South Caucasus Platform meeting is scheduled to be held in Turkey, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said Sunday, indicating that the issue and other regional developments were discussed with his Azerbaijani counterpart.

Çavuşoğlu, on the sidelines of Sunday’s Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Islamabad, met with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov.

Çavuşoğlu said that Turkey believes Georgia will also attend the upcoming meeting.

Ankara has made frequent calls for a six-nation platform comprising of Turkey, Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia for permanent peace, stability and cooperation in the region, saying it would be a win-win initiative for all regional actors in the Caucasus.

Turkey believes that permanent peace is possible through mutual security-based cooperation among the states and people of the South Caucasus region.

Russia this month hosted the inaugural meeting of the regional platform.

“We discussed the latest situation in the region, the normalization of relations between the countries of the post-conflict region, the results of the first meeting in the 3+3 format,” Bayramov tweeted after his meeting with Çavuşoğlu, while Turkey’s top diplomat underlined: “We will continue to act together at every stage of normalization in our region.”

Çavuşoğlu also spoke on the recent normalization steps with Armenia.

Reiterating the announcement that a special representative will be appointed and that the move was reciprocated by Yerevan, Çavuşoğlu said that some airlines had flight demands that will be answered.

Turkey appointed Serdar Kılıç, a former ambassador to the United States, as a special envoy, while Armenia appointed National Assembly Deputy Speaker Ruben Rubinyan as its special envoy.

The borders between the two countries have been closed for decades, and diplomatic relations have been on hold.

Armenia and Turkey signed a landmark peace accord in 2009 to restore ties and open their shared border after decades, but the deal was never ratified and ties have remained tense.

Relations between Armenia and Turkey have historically been complicated. Turkey’s position on the events of 1915 is that Armenians lost their lives in eastern Anatolia after some sided with the invading Russians and revolted against the Ottoman forces. The subsequent relocation of Armenians resulted in numerous casualties, with massacres by militaries and militia groups from both sides increasing the death toll.

Turkey objects to the presentation of the incidents as “genocide” but describes the 1915 events as a tragedy in which both sides suffered casualties.

During the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict last year, Ankara supported Baku and accused Yerevan of occupying Azerbaijan’s territories.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decadeslong dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies within Azerbaijan but was under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.

Moscow brokered a peace deal last November to end six weeks of fighting over the territory, during which more than 6,600 people were killed. The Russia-brokered truce allowed Azerbaijan to reclaim control over large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas that the Armenia-backed separatists controlled.

BRUSSELS 

The head of the European Council, will host the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia for a trilateral meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, a day before a summit of the Eastern Partnership.

According to EU sources, Charles Michel will first hold separate meetings with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian premier Nikol Pashinyan before a tripartite meeting later in the evening.

EU sources welcomed the establishment of a direct line of communication between the defense chiefs of the two countries after the war in Nagorno-Karabakh last year and said that there was more to be done to stabilize ties between them.

Last month, Aliyev and Pashinyan met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia.

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine will attend the Eastern Partnership summit on Wednesday, while Belarus will not join as it suspended its participation in the organization.

The political and economic relations of the EU with the five attending countries will be evaluated at the summit, which is also expected to discuss Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine’s border.

The EU is expected to call on the Eastern Partnership countries to accelerate political, economic, and judicial reforms at the summit. A new EU regional economic investment plan of €2.3 billion ($2.6 billion) for the five countries is also expected to be approved.

According to a senior EU official, as part of the investment plan proposed by the EU Commission in July, the amount of investment in each country will depend on how far the countries will progress in structural reforms and the projects that they present.

Relations between the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia have been tense since 1991 when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Upper Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions.

New clashes erupted on Sept. 27, 2020, and during the six-week war, Azerbaijan retook several cities and 300 settlements and villages.

The conflict ended in November 2020 in a Russia-brokered deal that saw Armenia cede swathes of territory it had occupied for decades.

In January, the leaders of the three countries agreed to develop economic ties and infrastructure for the benefit of the entire Caucasus region.