Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was the first to announce the next round of the talks late on Tuesday. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian confirmed on Wednesday that the meeting of the Armenian and Azerbaijani government commissions dealing with the border delimitation process is “planned for January.”
The two sides worked out in August “regulations” for joint activities of the commissions dealing with the delimitation process. The regulations say that the process will be based, unless agreed otherwise, on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration in which newly independent ex-Soviet republics recognized each other’s Soviet-era borders. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry downplayed in October the legal significance of that declaration, saying that it “has nothing to do with the question of where the borders of CIS member states lie and which territories belong to which country.”
The agreement came four months after Pashinian controversially agreed to cede four disputed border areas to Azerbaijan. The unilateral land transfer sparked massive anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan in May and June. Protest leaders said that it will encourage Baku to demand further Armenian concessions without ceding anything in return.
Pashinian again defended the concessions in his New Year’s Eve address to the nation. He said on Wednesday that the two commissions should build upon the “positive experience of the border delimitation in 2024.”
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan declined to say which sections of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border will likely be delimited next. He seemed to dismiss opposition speculation that Baku will demand the unilateral handover of several enclaves inside Armenia which were controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by the Armenian army in the early 1990s.
The Azerbaijani side seized at the time a bigger Armenian enclave as well as large swathes of agricultural land belonging to this and other border communities of Armenia. It occupied more Armenian territory during border clashes in 2021 and 2022.
“I don’t think that the two countries are now prepared to discuss this issue at the moment,” Mirzoyan told reporters. Baku and Yerevan are inclined to concentrate on other, “less risky” border sections, he said.
It also remains unclear which maps or other legal documents will be used by them. The Armenian government insisted until last fall that Soviet military maps drawn in the 1970s should be the main blueprint for the border delimitation. Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigorian, who heads the Armenian delegation in the border talks, indicated in October a change in this position rejected by Baku.
“Those maps are not the only maps that should be used or, I think, will be used in the delimitation process because there are questions that are not answered by them,” Grigorian said without going into details.