During the official visit of the Foreign Minister of Armenia to Brazil, the spokesperson of MFA Ani Badalyan gave an interview to Radio Senado, which is broadcast in over 100 cities across Brazil, reaching around 2 million audience.
The interview covered developments regarding the signing of the “Agreement on Peace and Establishment of Interstate Relations between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan”, the other two aspects of the normalization process with Azerbaijan, namely border delimitation and unblocking of regional infrastructure. The normalization process with Türkiye as well as Armenia’s bilateral relations with Brazil were also touched upon.
“So the first one is the peace treaty. For the past three years, there have been extensive negotiations on the draft text of the agreement, there have been meetings between the two foreign ministers, as well as the leaders of the two countries, and there were also exchanges of the proposals on the text of the agreement. And I’m sure you have been following the developments: we announced that the text of the peace treaty has been agreed upon. By agreeing to the last version, the last edition of the peace treaty, Armenia paved the way to say that the text of the peace treaty is now agreed upon, and the negotiations are finalized. Of course, the next question comes: when are you going to sign the treaty? Yes, because if the text is ready, then when is the signing? So what we did was we proposed to Azerbaijan to sign the treaty, start the consultations about the venue and the place of the treaty to sign the treaty. This is our vision”.
Referring to the accusations made those days by Azerbaijan on the alleged ceasefire violations, Ani Badalyan stated: “I think it’s crystal clear that Armenia has no intention to have any violations of the ceasefire, just the opposite: we are interested in having stability at the border, and our initiatives come to prove that. To have more predictability and more clarity, we have even proposed to Azerbaijan to have a mechanism to identify and to verify the violations of the ceasefire. We have also proposed to Azerbaijan to create arms control and verification mechanism”.
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On the cooperation between Armenia and Brazil, Ani Badalyan made the following remarks. “The relations between Armenia and Brazil are very effective. We have a dynamic political dialogue between the two countries at different levels. Of course, in this context, I should mention the minister’s visit and the meeting between the two ministers. I can definitely say that the agenda was quite broad. So at the core, we have political dialogue, which is based upon mutual respect and also the democratic values, which we believe we strongly share with Brazil.
I should add two more points here when we speak about the relations between Armenia and Brazil.
One as you know, Brazil is one of the key partners in Latin America. And fostering relations with Latin America is one of the important elements of the foreign policy of Armenia. Last year, exactly these days, the Minister was paying a visit to Uruguay and Argentina. So we view this partnership with the Latin American countries from a broader perspective, as partners with whom we can cooperate on many different international issues. And for example, with Brazil, again, we have very concrete topics to cooperate on, which is sustainable development, environmental issues. As you know, Brazil will host in Belem COP-30, and Armenia won last year the hosting of COP-17 in Yerevan. So here we are very much also looking forward to close cooperation with Brazil, both through exchanges, events that we can organize jointly.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia