The move highlights the West’s growing engagement in the volatile Caucasus region, where Russia, distracted by its war in Ukraine, has visible influence after decades of dominance.
Last month, at least 286 other people were killed on both sides before a U. S. -brokered truce ended the worst fighting since the Neighbors’ War in 2020.
Baku and Yerevan fought two wars, in 2020 and 2020, in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, an Armenian enclave of Azerbaijan.
“I very much appreciate America’s efforts (to) return our 17 prisoners of war,” Pashinyan said Tuesday on Twitter.
He expressed hope for more “progress in resolving humanitarian unrest and peace in the region,” with foreign mediation.
U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a trip to Latin America, began a three-way verbal telephone exchange with Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov on Tuesday.
Blinken welcomed the prisoners’ release and “reiterated our commitment to assisting Armenia and Azerbaijan peacefully in these matters,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
Blinken also “expressed our appreciation for the positive steps Armenia and Azerbaijan are taking to succeed in a lasting peace agreement. “
The ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia met jointly with Blinken on September 20 on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, and the two held talks on Sunday in Geneva.
Geneva talks about an assembly organized by the EU on August 31 in Brussels between Pashinyan and the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev.
With Moscow isolated globally after its invasion of Ukraine in February, the United States and the European Union have played a leading role in mediating the normalization procedure between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The six-week war in 2020 claimed the lives of more than 6500 people on both sides and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
From the deal, Armenia ceded swaths of territory it had controlled for decades, and Moscow deployed around 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Armenian separatists from Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan. The resulting confrontation resulted in some 30,000 deaths.