Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanian said this is one of the main obstacles to the signing of the treaty strongly backed by the United States and the European Union.
“Azerbaijan still does not want to accept a clear border line between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which leads us to suspect that Azerbaijan has far-reaching goals and may make territorial claims against the Republic of Armenia in the future,” Kostanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Thursday.
This is why, he said, Yerevan insists that 1975 Soviet military maps be used as a basis for delimiting the long Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
Baku has rejected the proposed mechanism in delimitation talks with Yerevan held so far. It stressed earlier this year that Azerbaijan’s borders with other neighboring states have been delimited and demarcated “on the basis of analyses and examination of legally binding documents, rather than any specially chosen map.”
The most recent round of delimitation talks took place on July 12 three days before the EU chief, Charles Michel, hosted yet another meeting of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Brussels.
Michel said after the meeting that the two leaders reaffirmed their earlier “understanding that Armenia’s territory covers 29,800 square kilometers and Azerbaijan’s 86,600 square kilometers.” Aliyev has still not publicly acknowledged, however, Armenia’s total internationally recognized area cited by Michel.
Opposition leaders and other critics of the Armenian government note that Baku is unwilling to do that even after Pashinian pledged in May to recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh through the peace deal. This means, they say, that even such a far-reaching concession offered by him would not safeguard Armenian territory from future Azerbaijani attacks.
Following Pashinian’s pledge, Azerbaijan also tightened its crippling blockade of Karabakh’s only land link with Armenia. Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan warned last week that the region is now “on the verge of starvation.”
Kostanian said that lingering differences between Yerevan and Baku on the question of the “rights and security” of Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population are also hampering the deal. The official was careful not to speculate about possible timelines for its signing.