The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan held talks in Geneva on a long-term peace treaty, according to officials in Baku and Yerevan, following recent fatal clashes between archenemies.
Last month, at least 286 other people were killed on both sides before a U. S. -brokered truce ended the worst fighting since the 2020 war over the Caucasus’ neighbor.
Baku and Yerevan fought two wars, in 2020 and 2020, in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, an Armenian enclave of Azerbaijan.
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov met in Geneva on Sunday to begin “drafting the text of the peace treaty,” the Foreign Ministry in Baku said on Monday.
He said the talks followed the assembly organized by the EU on August 31 in Brussels between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Azerbaijan for the “complete withdrawal of Armenian armed groups from Azerbaijani territories, the opening of lines of communication and navigation,” the ministry said in a statement.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said: “The parties exchanged concepts on the peace treaty, ensuring the rights and security promises of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
He reiterated his demands related to the “withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from the sovereign territory of Armenia,” the release of prisoners of war and “the arrival of foreign mechanisms on the border. “
The two foreign ministers last met in September in New York for talks mediated by the U. S. Secretary of State. U. S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
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.
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.
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.