Armenia and Azerbaijan allowed a July 1 deadline for finalizing a border delimitation agreement between the two countries to lapse, as their deputy prime ministers held fresh talks on the matter on Monday.
The governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan did not address the lapse in the deadline, which was agreed to in May, but Armenia’s Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan’s office reported that he met his Azerbaijani counterpart, Shahin Mustafayev for another round of talks on Monday.
“Negotiations continue constructively,” said a statement issued on Monday by Grigoryan’s office.
“According to the relevant agreements, the commissions are working to agree on a draft regulation on the joint activities of the State Commission for demarcation of the state border and border security of the Republic of Armenia and the State Commission for demarcation of the state border and border security of the Republic of Azerbaijan,” the statement added.
The announcement also said that, as of July 1, the “commissions routinely handed over draft regulations to each other and held several discussions,” adding that the approval process would be completed “soon.”
A similar announcement was issued by Mustafayev’s office.
The border delimitation process began in earnest on April 19, when Armenia and Azerbaijan reached an agreement, by which Yerevan ceded four villages in the Tavush Province, sparking a mass movement demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
In May, the sides met to make the earlier agreement official and announced that, by July 1, a final agreement would be approved, based on which the delimitation and the demarcation process would proceed.
Azerbaijan has voiced a muted approval to Yerevan’s proposal to advance the border delimitation process based on the 1991 Alma Ata agreement, which is a document drawn as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The signatories of that document agreed to recognize each other’s Soviet-era borders. Armenia and Azerbaijan both signed the agreement.
Since 2021, Azerbaijan has seized swaths of territory in Armenia by breaching the country’s sovereign border.
The April 19 agreement did not see Azerbaijan return those and other Armenian territories it has been occupying since the 1990’s.