Baku announced its desire to conclude a peace treaty with Armenia by the end of the year

The Azerbaijani authorities expect to conclude a peace treaty with Armenia by the end of the year and call on Yerevan to record recognition of the territorial integrity of the neighboring republic. About this TASS reported Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan Hikmet Hajiyev.

“We still hope for the signing of a peace treaty by the end of this year and call on the Armenian political leadership to take the main step – officially, with their signature under the peace treaty, to record recognition of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, including the Karabakh economic region of our republic,” Hajiyev said.

Baku also calls on Yerevan to commit to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Azerbaijan, including attempts to bring issues of interaction with citizens of Armenian origin in Karabakh to international platforms “under the pretext of ensuring the rights and security of this population group.” Hajiyev emphasized that these are citizens of Azerbaijan and their rights and security will be ensured by the Constitution.”

He added that Baku highly appreciates the contribution of international mediators to the normalization of Azerbaijani-Armenian relations. The aggravation of the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh has been going on since September 2020, when fighting began in the region between the militaries of the two countries. As a result, a tripartite statement was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The situation around the region deteriorated again in 2022, when the Azerbaijani State Border Service established a checkpoint in the Lachin corridor, on the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.

On May 25, 2023, Pashinyan and Aliyev, through the mediation of Putin, discussed relations between the two countries in the Kremlin, but did not adopt a joint statement at the end of the day. At the same time, as Aliyev noted, after Armenia’s statements on recognizing the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, the issue of agreeing on the points of the peace treaty will be “much easier.”

At the end of August, Pashinyan said that the situation in the region remains tense. According to him, Yerevan passed on Baku new proposals for a draft peace treaty. On September 3, the Armenian Prime Minister, in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, said that Russia was moving away from the South Caucasus, and Russian peacekeepers did not control the Lachin corridor. The Kremlin did not agree with the prime minister’s words, emphasizing that the Russian Federation is “an integral part of this region” and therefore cannot leave it.