“We have received Azerbaijan’s reply regarding the peace treaty,” the ministry spokeswoman, Ani Badalian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday evening. She did not disclose it.
The two sides have said that they agree on 15 of the 17 articles of the draft treaty discussed by them. The unpublicized Armenian proposals sent to Baku in November relate to the two other articles.
The Azerbaijani side wants them to require the two South Caucasus countries to drop international lawsuits filed against each other and ban the presence of third-party monitors or troops on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. It is specifically seeking the withdrawal of European Union monitors deployed in Armenian border areas. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian voiced in December reservations about both demands.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Foreign Ministry in Yerevan did not clarify whether the Azerbaijani reply is acceptable to it and will remove the remaining sticking points.
A deputy speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament, Ziyafet Askerov, raised more questions in that regard late last week when he claimed that one of those points concerns Azerbaijan’s demands for a land corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave passing through Armenia. Askerov’s Armenian opposite number, Ruben Rubinian, denied his claim.
Baku wants people and cargo transported to and from Nakhichevan 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.
Pashinian’s government submitted corresponding proposals to Baku in October. Badalian said on Tuesday that the Azerbaijani side has still not formally replied to them.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly made the signing of the peace deal conditional on a change of Armenia’s current constitution which he says contains territorial claims to his country. While rejecting Aliyev’s precondition in public, Pashinian has pledged to try to enact a new Armenian constitution through a referendum. But this is unlikely to happen before June 2026.
Armenian opposition leaders maintain that Aliyev has no intention to sign any agreement before clinching more far-reaching concessions from Pashinian. They say that Pashinian’s appeasement policy has only encouraged the Azerbaijani strongman to make more demands on Yerevan.
