“At the moment, 15 out of 17 points of the peace agreement have been agreed upon,” Ziyafet Askerov, a deputy speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament was quoted by the Trend news agency as saying. “One of the two points that have not been agreed upon concerns the opening of the Zangezur corridor. The second point concerns territorial claims enshrined in Armenia’s constitution.”
Askerov’s Armenian opposite number, Ruben Rubinian, denied his claim. “This is absolutely not true,” Rubinian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Askerov seemed to contradict Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s remarks made in December. Aliyev said the two remaining articles of the draft treaty put forward by Baku would require the two sides to drop international lawsuits filed against each other and ban the presence of third-party monitors or troops on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian essentially confirmed this afterwards, a fact emphasized by Rubinian.
Also, a senior aide to Aliyev said last summer that Baku and Yerevan have agreed to exclude the issue of transport links for Nakhichevan from the text of the peace deal and to address it separately.
The Azerbaijani side wants people and cargo transported to and from Nakhichevan through Armenia’s Syunik province to be exempt from Armenian border checks. Yerevan has rejected these demands, at least until recently. But it has also offered to put in place “simplified procedures” for such transit.
Members of Pashinian’s political team made last week ambiguous statements about his current terms for opening the transport links for Nakhichevan, fueling Armenian opposition claims that Yerevan may have agreed to the extraterritorial corridor demanded by Baku. Opposition leaders say Pashinian has also accepted Aliyev’s demand to change the Armenian constitution.
Aliyev has also set other conditions for signing the peace deal sought by Pashinian.