The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan held a second day of talks brokered by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington, in what some diplomatic sources are calling a week-long “marathon” of negotiations.
High-ranking State Department officials said that Ararat Mirzoyan and Jeyhun Bayramov, the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, will have a series of meetings this week, Voice of America reported on Tuesday.
“Hosting peace talks this week with Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov at our new facility at the George P. Schultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center. Dialogue is key to reaching a lasting peace in the South Caucasus region,” Blinken tweeted.
Aside from a brief blurb about Monday’s meeting, Armenia’s foreign ministry has not commented on the fact that the Washington talks are supposed to last “a few days,” as State Department officials noted.
The discussions between the parties, which started Monday morning, are proceeding constructively, said Luis Bono, the State Department’s Senior Advisor for Caucasus Negotiations and the U.S. Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group told VOA.
According to these senior diplomats, the United States is committed to contributing to the peaceful, democratic, and prosperous future of the South Caucasus region, and direct dialogue is the only way to resolve issues and achieve lasting peace, which Washington promotes.
“Ultimately, the way for it to be prescriptive is up for these two countries to decide. Ultimately, what we believe is that peace is possible in the South Caucasus. That’s what we’re looking for, peace and stability between these two countries in the Nagorno-Karabakh region,” State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said during a press briefing.
“We think that direct dialogue through diplomacy is key here,” Patel added, noting that the U.S. will continue to be engaged on this issue. He also stressed that the U.S. continues to insist
that free flow of traffic and people and commerce through the Lachin corridor must be ensured, in an apparent reference to Azerbaijan’s blockade of Artsakh since December 12.
Blinken already hosted Mirzoyan and Bayramov—first in separate short meetings, and then in the format of trilateral discussions.
Bono said the document being discussed is called “Agreement on the Normalization of Relations,” adding that “U.S. seeks for the parties to normalize their relations, to be able to live together, to strengthen economic ties and even their collective security in the region.”
“This is a complex and comprehensive process, within which all issues are discussed,” he said.
“Both parties have acknowledged that this is the first time that they will be able to meet over the course of a few days,” a senior State Department official said, according to Azatutyun.am. “We expect discussions throughout the week. Our goal is to make sure that the ministers are able to sit down and talk to each other.”
The official at the State Department said that the Washington talks between Mirzoyan and Bayramov were focused on trying to hammer out an agreement on “normalization of relations.”
“It is for both parties to normalize their relations to be able to live together […], to strengthen their economic ties and perhaps even to reinforce their collective security in the region,” he said, adding that all issues, including issues of how ethnic minorities are treated in both countries in terms of their rights and security, are “being discussed.”
Another senior U.S. official familiar with the negotiations said that “rights and security are something that we believe is very important in terms of what the future of the region looks like, is something that we have continually engaged with throughout the region, and we will continue to be engaged on.”
The official also reiterated the importance of ensuring free movement of commercial and private vehicles along the Lachin Corridor between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh that was completely blocked by Azerbaijan on April 23 when it established a checkpoint at the entrance to the five-kilometer-wide corridor.
