Azerbaijan rejects Armenia’s new proposal to sign peace deal

September 10 () –

Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry has rejected the Armenian authorities’ new proposal to sign a peace agreement excluding the points of conflict from the text and has condemned the latest statements by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

The ministry said the main condition for signing the text is “ending Armenia’s ongoing territorial claim against Azerbaijan, which is enshrined in multiple legal and political documents,” including the Armenian Constitution.

“We urge the Armenian side, which continues to use aggressive and defamatory rhetoric against our country using various platforms, to stop making statements that harm the prospects for peace,” the statement added.

This comes after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Tuesday at a dialogue forum in Yerevan that “thirteen articles and the preamble” of the text are “fully agreed upon,” according to the Armenpress news agency.

Pashinyan also denied during his speech Baku’s accusations that the Armenian Constitution contains territorial claims against Azerbaijan regarding the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. On the contrary, he accused the neighbouring country of the same.

Yerevan and Baku have been engaged in talks for months to try to reach a peace agreement, contacts boosted by Azerbaijan’s latest military offensive in September 2023 against Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory under Azerbaijani sovereignty.

The anti-terrorist operation in Baku, which lasted less than 24 hours, led to a ceasefire agreement that included the dissolution of the pro-Armenian separatist authorities and forced almost the entire Armenian population to flee to the neighbouring country.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a territory of about 4,400 square kilometers in the South Caucasus that was reintegrated into Azerbaijan following the aforementioned offensive in 2023, after the wars between 1988 and 1994 and the one in 2020. Until then, the area, with an Armenian majority, had been under the control of pro-Armenian forces for more than three decades despite the fact that the international community recognized the region as Azerbaijani sovereignty.