Aliyev and Pashinyan draw “red lines” for Putin: what closed doors hide

What is the difference between the Washington and Russian settlement options

Vladimir Putin held first separate and then trilateral talks in Sochi with Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev. “We still need to end the conflict,” he said. Prior to this, the Russian side openly criticized the attempts of the West to interfere in the Armenian-Azerbaijani settlement. But both guests assured Putin that there was no need to worry about this: Armenia and Azerbaijan appreciate the mediation efforts of the Russian Federation, and the agreements reached in Prague, according to Pashinyan, do not contradict Moscow’s proposals.

What will be discussed in Sochi, Vladimir Putin himself explained in sufficient detail at a meeting with members of the Valdai Club. Armenia and Azerbaijan, he recalled, want to conclude a peace treaty by the end of the year. But there are two competing projects – Russian and Western. The Western, or Washington, option, according to Putin, provides for “recognition of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Karabakh as a whole.” “If Armenia thinks so, please. We will support any choice of the Armenian people,” VVP emphasized. An alternative option is to prescribe in the agreement either a special status for Nagorno-Karabakh, or guarantees for the Armenian population of this region. (However, the specific proposals of the Russian Federation on this subject have not been officially published anywhere.) “If the Armenian people and the Armenian leadership believe that Karabakh has some peculiarities of its own and this somehow needs to be discussed in a future peace treaty, this is also possible,” the president said. He noted that all formulations should be acceptable to Azerbaijan, and “this is a very complex, frankly, difficult issue.”

Proceeding from this mediating position, the negotiations in Sochi were structured as follows. First, Vladimir Putin held a separate meeting with Nikol Pashinyan. The president himself was laconic in the open part and only expressed the hope that during the negotiations it would be possible to “find the key points that would allow moving forward.” “This conflict has been going on for decades, so it must be ended sometime,” he said. From Pashinyan’s response, it followed that Yerevan has “red lines”, without agreements on the observance of which the negotiations are unlikely to be successful. This is, firstly, the withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops, which in March 2022 “intruded into the zone of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh”, and on September 13 occupied the new sovereign territories of Armenia. “We need a clear formulation of the need to withdraw the Azerbaijani Armed Forces to positions as of May 11, 2021,” he told Putin.

Another issue of principle for the Armenian side is the conditions for unblocking regional communications. Yerevan insists that the road linking the western regions of Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan (the so-called Zangezur corridor) should be under the full control of the Armenian authorities and operated according to Armenian laws. The functions of control, according to him, could be taken over by the border service of the FSB of the Russian Federation. Pashinyan also told Putin about the need to create a security mechanism that will not allow Azerbaijan to continue to encroach on the territory of Armenia. He recalled that, according to Moscow, the tripartite commission on border delimitation should have become such a mechanism. But these hopes did not come true: the commission was unable to stop the aggression of Azerbaijan.

Pashinyan did not publicly disclose the essence of the proposals on Nagorno-Karabakh, which the Russian side put forward in the draft document “on the basic principles and parameters for establishing interstate relations” between Armenia and Azerbaijan. However, he emphasized: a) they are acceptable for Yerevan, b) they do not contradict the agreements reached on October 6 in Prague. (In other words, according to Pashinyan, there are no fundamental differences between the Russian and Washington versions of the peace treaty.) “During the Prague talks, I was guided by your public statements on Nagorno-Karabakh,” he assured Vladimir Putin.

Behind closed doors, Russian-Armenian negotiations continued for about an hour, after which Ilham Aliyev got the opportunity to declare his “red lines”. It should be noted that compared to Pashinyan, the President of Azerbaijan looked much more confident and relaxed. However, his public announcement left little hope that “some peculiarities” of Nagorno-Karabakh could be written into a peace treaty, as Vladimir Putin suggested at the Valdai Forum. The main problem: Aliyev does not think at all that the status of Nagorno-Karabakh needs to be discussed now or in some medium term. “The Karabakh conflict is already history. It was resolved two years ago, and there is nothing to discuss here,” he stressed. The subject of trilateral negotiations in Sochi, according to Aliyev, can only be those issues that are outside the boundaries of Nagorno-Karabakh (that is, the demarcation and delimitation of borders, the exchange of prisoners, the conditions for creating transport corridors, etc.) “Normalization of Azerbaijani-Armenian relations is this is the format that requires serious steps,” he stressed, noting that he is counting on the personal role of Vladimir Putin in these matters.

After the meeting with Aliyev, the negotiations continued in a trilateral format. However, at the time of signing the issue, no specific agreements were reported. Recall that on the eve of the Sochi meeting, a rally of thousands took place in Stepanakert, the participants of which stated that the world community should recognize the right of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) to independence and self-determination. Similar sentiments, according to polls, are also shared by the vast majority of Armenian citizens.