YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Russia urged Armenia on Wednesday to agree to resume Russian-mediated negotiations with Azerbaijan based on earlier understandings reached by the leaders of the three countries.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin and the Armenian ambassador in Moscow, Vagharshak Harutiunyan, discussed the normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations “in detail” during a meeting requested by Harutiunyan.
“The Russian side emphasized the urgent need for an early resumption of trilateral work in this area based on a set of agreements between the leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan,” the ministry said in a short statement. It gave no other details.
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry and embassy in Russia did not immediately comment on the meeting.
Late last year, Moscow repeatedly offered to host high-level Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks as it sought to sideline the West and regain the initiative in the negotiation process. In early December, the Russian Foreign Ministry rebuked the Armenian leadership for ignoring these offers. It warned that Yerevan’s current preference of Western mediation may spell more trouble for the Armenian people.
The warning came amid unprecedented tensions between Moscow and Yerevan which rose further after Russian peacekeepers’ failure to prevent or stop Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh. The 2,000 or so peacekeepers remain deployed in Karabakh in accordance with a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
Citing the Azerbaijani offensive, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on January 13 that Baku and Moscow effectively scrapped the truce accord. He also accused Azerbaijan’s leadership of undermining prospects for an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty with statements amounting to territorial claims to Armenia.
Pashinyan hoped, at least until now, to sign such a treaty as a result of peace talks mediated by the United States and the European Union.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev twice cancelled meetings with Pashiniyan which the EU planned to host in October. Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov similarly withdrew from a meeting with his Armenian counterpart scheduled for November 20 in Washington. Baku accused the Western powers of pro-Armenian bias. It now wants to negotiate with Yerevan without third-party mediation.
