EU’s Michel urges faster work toward peace from Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders
European Council President Charles Michel said after a trilateral meeting in Brussels with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia on August 31 that the Caucasus rivals had agreed to accelerate “substantive work” toward a peace treaty.
The head of the EU executive said the fourth such trilateral talks since an intense 44-day war in late 2020 were “open and productive” and included discussions on reestablishing transport links, borders, and the freeing of wartime detainees.
The first EU-mediated meeting since May 22 was attended by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.
It follows an outbreak of fighting over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh on August 1-3 in which at least one Azerbaijani and two ethnic Armenian soldiers were killed. The two sides blame each other for the violence.
“Today we agree to step up substantive work to advance on the peace treaty governing inter-state relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan and tasked the foreign ministers to meet within one month to work on draft texts,” Michel’s statement said.
“We also had a detailed discussion on humanitarian issues, including demining, detainees and the fate of missing persons.”
Michel said he stressed to the Azerbaijani side the importance of further freeing Armenian detainees, which has been a major demand since Yerevan’s reluctant acceptance of a Moscow-brokered cease-fire that returned significant territory long held by ethnic Armenians to Azerbaijan.
He also urged each side to better prepare its public for peace despite decades of frozen conflict since the demise of the Soviet Union.
The Brussels meeting comes one day after Armenian and Azerbaijani commissions on border delimitation gathered in Moscow on August 30.
“With all these discussions, I would like to underline that it is important to take the population along on both sides and prepare them for a long-term sustainable peace,” Michel said. “Public messaging is critical in this regard — in a sensitive situation like this every word spoken in public is obviously listened to by the other side and weighed.”
Michel said a meeting between border authorities would take place in November.
Nagorno-Karabakh, which along with seven adjacent districts had been under ethnic Armenian control for nearly three decades prior to the war in 2020, is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.
Armenia lost control over parts of the breakaway region and the seven adjacent districts as part of the Russian-brokered cease-fire after a six-week war over Nagorno-Karabakh broke out in 2020, leaving more than 6,500 dead. An estimated 2,000 Russian troops have been deployed to monitor the situation.
Earlier this month, Baku forcibly took control of several strategic heights near the disputed region.
Source: rferl
