The Reuters news agency quoted Hikmet Hajiyev, a top foreign policy adviser to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, as telling reporters in London that Baku believes "the border delimitation issue should be kept separate from peace treaty discussions."
The issue has been one of the main sticking points in Armenian-Azerbaijani talks on the treaty. Armenia has said until now that it wants the peace deal to contain a concrete mechanism for the border delimitation.
Yerevan insists on using late Soviet-era military maps as a basis in that process. Baku rejects the idea backed by the European Union.
Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday, Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanian insisted that the two South Caucasus countries must have a “clear border” reflecting a 1991 declaration signed by newly independent ex-Soviet republics.
Kostanian suggested in July that Baku is reluctant to formally recognize Armenia’s existing borders because it wants to leave the door open for future territorial claims.
“They key question is whether the parties will manage to agree on the delimitation principles and the issue of maps before signing the peace treaty,” Tigran Grigorian, a political analyst, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Wednesday. “There seems to be no such agreement yet.”