Pashinian spoke to the official Armenpress news agency to comment on multiple conditions for an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal reiterated by by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in an interview with a state-run Russian broadcaster on Wednesday. They include a change of the Armenian constitution which Baku says lays claim to Nagorno-Karabakh recaptured by the Azerbaijani army last year.
Pashinian again cited a September ruling by Armenia’s Constitutional Court to deny such claims. He said that it is Baku that effectively lays claim to Armenia’s internationally recognized territory. He pointed to Aliyev’s regular description of much of that territory as “Western Azerbaijan.”
“It is obvious that with the talk of so-called ‘Western Azerbaijan,’ official Baku wants to flesh out its territorial claims against Armenia which are enshrined in the constitution of Azerbaijan,” he said.
Aliyev again demanded on Wednesday that Yerevan ensure the return of Azerbaijanis who lived in Soviet Armenia until the late 1980s. He said nothing about the right of return of Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population that fled region following Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive.
Aliyev also said that Yerevan’s arms acquisitions pose a security threat to his country and must therefore stop.
“We are acquiring weapons exclusively to protect the borders and territorial integrity of Armenia,” countered Pashinian.
“I can guarantee that Armenia has no intention, goal or plan to attack Azerbaijan or carry out provocative actions and will not go down that path. If Azerbaijan has no intention of attacking Armenia, then the probability of escalation in the region is zero,” added the Armenian premier.
Armenian officials said earlier this year that Baku may be planning to launch another military aggression against Armenia after hosting the COP29 climate summit in November. Pashinian’s administration is anxious to prevent such invasion by negotiating a bilateral peace treaty.
Aliyev confirmed that the two sides agree on 15 of the 17 articles of the would-be treaty. He said the two remaining articles put forward by Baku would require them to drop international lawsuits filed against each other and ban the presence of third-party monitors or troops on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The Azerbaijani side is specifically seeking the withdrawal of European Union monitors deployed in Armenian border areas.
Pashinian voiced reservations about both demands. In particular, he reiterated that the monitors should leave only demarcated sections of the border. Only a small section of the more than 1,000-kilometer-long frontier has been delimited and demarcated to date.