June 23 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinián, has announced this Thursday that the next round of contacts with Azerbaijan in the United States to discuss a possible peace agreement will take place next week, after the Armenian side announced at the beginning of the month that the meeting had been postponed without a date at the request of Baku.
“The meeting of foreign ministers will take place in Washington next week. Our delegation is leaving for the United States in this spirit,” Pashinián said, according to the Armenia News portal.
“Regarding the relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, our position remains the same: all necessary efforts must be made to sign a treaty establishing peace and normalizing relations,” he declared after noting that the issue of the rights and security of Armenians in Nagorno Karabagh.
The spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, Ani Badalían, reported on June 8 that “at the request of the Azeri side, the next round of discussions that it was going to have the following week in Washington” had been postponed. The meeting was scheduled for June 12, after the latest contacts in the United States, Belgium, Moldova and Russia, aimed at promoting the peace process.
After this decision, the US government showed its willingness to reschedule the event. The spokesman for the US State Department, Matthew Miller, confirmed that the reasons for postponing the meeting are due “one hundred percent to scheduling problems”, maintaining that the Biden Administration hoped to “reschedule it as soon” as possible.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have exchanged in recent months numerous accusations of violation of the 2020 ceasefire, which ended the Second Nagorno Karabagh War -after the 1994 war-. The conflict ended in victory for Azerbaijan, which recovered territories taken by Armenia in the First Nagorno Karabagh War, including the important city of Shusha.
Since then, both countries have maintained various contacts to try to sign a peace agreement, although the talks have encountered various obstacles, including the situation around the Lachín corridor, which connects Armenia with the self-proclaimed republic of Arstaj. The area has the presence of Russian soldiers deployed as peacekeepers under the aforementioned ceasefire agreement.
