Armenia and Azerbaijan tout possible peace deal

A long-awaited agreement that could bring peace to the South Caucasus after decades of conflict is close to being completed, Armenia and Azerbaijan have confirmed.

In a press conference on Saturday, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that his government has made a formal offer to Azerbaijan to sign a peace treaty, after judging that sufficient progress has been made on key issues in bilateral talks in recent months.

“We have 17 articles in the latest draft of the peace treaty. Thirteen of them, including the preamble, are fully agreed on,” Pashinyan said. “We offer the following — to take all agreed-upon articles and wordings and sign it as a peace treaty.”

The statement comes a day after the two sides announced that a deal on a joint border commission to demarcate and delimit their shared frontier had been signed. The two neighboring nations have fought a series of conflicts in recent years, both over Azerbaijan’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh and inside Armenia’s internationally recognized borders.

In the aftermath of a 2022 war, an EU monitoring mission has been deployed in Armenia to observe the tense situation on the border, and the country has pushed for the withdrawal of Russian border guards stationed there since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Speaking to POLITICO, Azerbaijani foreign policy chief Hikmet Hajiyev confirmed that there had been progress in bilateral talks, adding that the agreement on the border commission “should be seen as sufficient for the withdrawal of the EU contingent.” The country has consistently opposed Brussels’ mission, arguing that it increases the risk of conflict.

Last September, Azerbaijan launched an offensive to retake Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been controlled by its ethnic Armenian population since a war that followed the collapse of the USSR. W`ith Russian peacekeepers standing aside, virtually all of the mountainous region’s 100,000 residents were forced to flee to Armenia.

While the EU has strengthened political ties with Armenia in recent years as the country pivots away from Moscow’s sphere of influence, Brussels also maintains close relations with Azerbaijan. In 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen flew to Baku to sign a deal boosting gas exports from the fossil fuel-rich nation as part of efforts to diversify away from Russian energy.