Azatutyun.am. The European Union will continue to mediate peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, European Council President Charles Michel said after speaking with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev by phone on Monday.
They discussed “all issues on the Brussels agenda for the Azerbaijan-Armenia dialogue,” Michel said, alluding to Aliyev’s face-to-face talks with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian which he hosted in December, April and May.
“We will continue support in addressing humanitarian, connectivity and border issues as well as a future peace agreement,” the head of the EU’s main decision-making body added on Twitter.
Michel reported major progress on all these fronts after his last trilateral meeting with Aliyev and Pashinian. He said they agreed to meet in Brussels again in July or August.
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The top EU official did not comment on the next Armenian-Azerbaijani summit after his call with Aliyev. The Azerbaijani president’s office also did not mention it in its readout of the conversation.
In recent weeks, Baku and Yerevan have accused each other of not honoring their understandings brokered by the EU and Russia. Aliyev has implicitly threatened to resort to military action, saying that Yerevan is reluctant to demarcate the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and open a land corridor connecting Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave.
Pashinian charged last week that Azerbaijan is torpedoing peace talks to prepare the ground for another war with Armenia. He said Baku cancelled at the last minute a fresh meeting of senior Armenian and Azerbaijani officials which was due to take place in Brussels on June 27.
Russia has denounced the EU’s mediation efforts, saying that they are part of the West’s attempts to hijack Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks and use the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the standoff over Ukraine.
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned the 27-nation bloc in May against playing “geopolitical games” in the conflict zone. A senior EU diplomat insisted afterwards that Brussels is “not engaged in any kind of competition” with Moscow.
