Armenia and Azerbaijan have made more progress in ongoing negotiations on the delimitation of their border, the Armenian government said on Monday.
“Negotiations continue constructively,” read a short statement released by the office of Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan.
It said that the Armenian and Azerbaijani government commissions on border delimitation have proposed to each other draft “regulations” for their joint work and should work out a relevant common document “soon.”
The Azerbaijani government issued a similar statement. It too gave no details.
Read also
The two commissions pledged to agree on the regulations by July 1 when they announced on April 19 the start of the delimitation process that took the form of Armenian territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. In the following weeks, Baku gained control of disputed border areas that that used to be occupied by four Azerbaijani villages captured by Armenian forces in 1991-1992.
For its part, the Azerbaijani army had at occupied at the time large swathes of nearby land belonging to several villages in Armenia’s Tavush province. It has not withdrawn from that land in return for the Armenian concessions. Baku has also refused to withdraw from Armenian territory seized by its troops in 2021 and 2022.
The land transfer strongly condemned by the Armenian opposition sparked angry protests in Tavush border villages seriously affected by it. The protests were led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, the then head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. After failing to scuttle preparations for the handover, Galstanian took his campaign to Yerevan where he held a series of big rallies in May and June in a bid to oust Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.
Pashinian repeatedly defended his unilateral concessions, saying that they will lay the groundwork for Azerbaijan’s recognition of Armenia’s territorial integrity. He said that this “positive experience” will be used in the border delimitation and demarcation process that will supposedly be based on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration signed by newly independent ex-Soviet republics.
Earlier on Monday, Pashinian refused to answer a question about the process when he was approached by RFE/RL correspondent in Yerevan.
The 1991 declaration committed Armenia, Azerbaijan and other ex-Soviet state to recognizing each other’s Soviet-era borders. But it does not contain a detailed description of those borders.
Yerevan has insisted, at least until recently, that the two South Caucasus states should use Soviet military maps drawn in the 1970s as a basis for the border delimitation. Baku has rejected this, highlighting its apparent desire to gain even more territory and cede nothing in return.