“Germany supports the territorial integrity of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and this must be the basis for all peace negotiations,” Baerbock said after meeting with her Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan.
“I believe that European Council President Charles Michel’s efforts could serve as a bridge for establishing peace between the two countries. Therefore, the start of a new round of negotiations is important,” she told a joint news conference.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had been scheduled to meet, together with Michel, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, in Spain on October 5. Aliyev withdrew from the talks at the last minute, citing pro-Armenian statements made by French officials.
Michel said afterwards that the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders will likely hold a trilateral meeting with him in Brussels later in October. That meeting did not take place either.
A senior Armenian lawmaker suggested on Monday that Aliyev is now reluctant to hold further talks with Pashinian to finalize an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord backed by the EU and the United States. The deal would commit Baku to explicitly recognizing Armenia’s current borders.
“Unfortunately, we still have serious concerns that … Azerbaijan still has, in one way or another, territorial claims to Armenia,” Mirzoyan said during the press conference with Baerbock.
There are lingering fears in Yerevan that Azerbaijan could invade Armenia to open a land corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave. Baerbock, who was due to proceed to Azerbaijan on Saturday, declined to say whether Germany would support a freeze on imports of Azerbaijani gas and oil or other EU sanctions against Baku in the event of such invasion. She spoke out against any further “escalation in this region.”
The German minister was also careful not to repeat her earlier condemnations of Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh that forced the region’s ethnic Armenian population to flee to Armenia. She said only that the more than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians “left their homeland for security reasons” and praised the Armenian government’s response to the exodus. Baerbock also announced that Berlin will provide 9.3 million euros ($10 million) in additional humanitarian aid to the refugees.