In a short statement, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov “agreed to continue efforts to finalize and conclude the agreement in a short period of time.” It gave no details of the talks held after a ministerial meeting of the “Consultative Regional Platform 3+3” comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia and Turkey.
Bayramov and Mirzoyan already pledged to “put additional efforts towards the conclusion of the Agreement on Peace and Establishment of Interstate Relations in the shortest possible period” during their previous talks hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in New York on September 26. The two sides do not seem to have moved closer to such an accord in the following weeks.
Baku has since continued to reject an Armenian proposal to sign an initial agreement that would leave out their remaining sticking points. It has insisted that any peace deal with Yerevan is conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution which it says contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan. Bayramov reaffirmed this precondition in his speech at the 3+3 meeting held earlier in the day.
On Tuesday, a senior Armenian lawmaker said Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian proposed to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev earlier this month that their foreign ministers hold two-day intensive talks to “agree on one or two articles of the peace treaty that have not been agreed upon” and sign the deal before next month’s COP29 summit in Baku. The Azerbaijani side did not confirm the proposal or react to it otherwise.
Another parliamentarian representing Pashinian’s Civil Contract party claimed on Wednesday that Baku is rejecting Armenian peace proposals in possible preparation for a new military aggression against Armenia.