The United States hopes to organize fresh Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations on the sidelines of next week’s NATO summit in Washington, the U.S. State Department acknowledged on Tuesday.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James O’ Brien announced last Friday that the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan have been invited to the summit along with representatives of other NATO “partner states.” He did not say whether they are expected to meet in the U.S. capital.
“I have no doubt that it’s something we’ll continue to work towards,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, said in this regard. “Specific meetings and engagements on the margins of the summit — I just don’t want to speak to the schedule yet.”
The Armenian and Azerbaijani governments have so far not commented on the possibility of such talks.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday that he sees an “extraordinary opportunity” to end the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict soon through a peace treaty discussed by the two South Caucasus states. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev reiterated, however, that the signing of the treaty is conditional on Armenia changing its constitution and other laws which he said contain territorial claims to Azerbaijan.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry rejected Aliyev’s precondition last month. Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan again said on Wednesday that the peace deal can be finalized and signed after “one month of intensive work.”
Meanwhile, Russia deplored Washington’s invitations extended to Baku and Yerevan, saying that they are part of U.S. attempts to “spread their destructive influence to all regions of the world” and “tear our friends and neighbors away from cooperation with Russia.”
“This aggravates tensions between the two republics, does not contribute to the Armenian-Azerbaijani dialogue and provokes an arms race in the region,” a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Andrei Nastasin, told a news briefing in Moscow.
Nastasin said Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements brokered by Russia in 2020-2022 remain the only realistic “basis for normalizing relations between Baku and Yerevan.”