Saturday, RFE/RL Learns New Details About Planned Pashinian-Aliyev Meeting • Heghine Buniatian Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev (L) and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian meet in Vienna, Austria, March 29, 2019. New details of an announced meeting between the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders in Brussels next month have been revealed to RFE/RL. A senior EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity, has provided some details about the upcoming meeting of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian of Armenia and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan that a spokesman for Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said yesterday the two leaders had agreed to have on December 15. “The goal is to bring Pashinian and Aliyev to the same table for confidence-building measures,” said the EU official. On November 19, the EU announced that Michel had telephone conversations with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia about the situation in the region. As a result, it said, the two leaders agreed to meet on the sidelines of the EU’s Eastern Partnership summit. “It is not clear yet how their Brussels meetings will look like, who of the EU leaders will sit, whether the defense ministers or foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan will be present,” the EU official told RFE/RL. Michel’s office said Pashinian and Aliyev would meet “to discuss the regional situation and ways of overcoming tensions for a prosperous and stable South Caucasus, which the EU supports.” It said they also agreed to establish a direct communication line, at the level of defense ministers, “to serve as an incident prevention mechanism.” The statement did not specify when such a line could become operational. “The aim of the forthcoming talks is to establish some sort of trust between the two leaders via confidence building measures, especially in the field of connectivity,” the EU official said. “We are talking here about transport corridors in Nagorno-Karabakh, transport projects involving both Armenia and Azerbaijan,” the source added. The Russia-brokered ceasefire agreement that Armenia and Azerbaijan signed to put an end to six weeks of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh last November also referred to a new route for a connection between ethnic Armenians inside Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia that was understood to be approved within the next three years, with the agreement of the parties, after which Russian peacekeepers would be redeployed to protect that route. It has been a year since the signing of that trilateral statement, but so far nothing has been reported about any agreement reached between the parties. The passing week has seen a further escalation of tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan that on November 16 had their worst fighting along their un-demarcated border since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. It was during that escalation that the president of the European Council had phone talks with Pashinian and Aliyev, calling for “urgent de-escalation and full respect of the ceasefire.” According to the EU official who talked to RFE/RL, “Michel, Pashinian and Aliyev have built up quite a good rapport in the last couple of months, and Michel has spoken to them 4-6 times in the last couple of months.” Besides, according to RFE/RL’s source, Michel also speaks regularly with the presidents of Turkey and Russia. In early November Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that a trilateral meeting of the leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan was being prepared in Moscow. Shortly after that announcement Armenia’s prime minister said that there was no agreement about any such meeting yet. It is still unclear whether Aliyev and Pashinian will have a tripartite meeting together with Russian President Vladimir Putin any time soon, or if they do, whether this meeting will be before or after their announced meeting in Brussels. Confirming the news of the upcoming meeting in Brussels, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that Baku has repeatedly stated its position on the post-conflict situation in the region, including in the international arena. “In this regard, we believe that the summit of the Eastern Partnership, and the meeting that will take place on the sidelines of this event will create additional opportunities,” Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Leyla Abdullayeva said. The Armenian Foreign Ministry has also confirmed the news of the upcoming meeting, but has not provided any further comments on that yet. EU Says Armenian, Azerbaijani Leaders Agree To Meet In Brussels In Mid-December Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian (left) and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will meet in Brussels next month to discuss border clashes and advancing diplomacy, the European Union said. “Leaders have agreed to meet in Brussels to discuss the regional situation and ways of overcoming tensions for a prosperous and stable South Caucasus, which the EU supports,” a spokesman for Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said in a statement on November 19. The meeting will take place on December 15 on the sidelines of the EU’s Eastern Partnership summit in Brussels. The announcement came after Michel held phone calls with Aliyev and Pashinian. “During the phone calls, the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders have also agreed to establish a direct communication line, at the level of respective Ministers of Defense, to serve as an incident prevention mechanism,” the EU said. It would be third face-to-face talks between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan since last year’s 44-day war over Nagorno-Karabakh that killed thousands before the sides agreed to a Russian-brokered cease-fire. The two previous meetings were in Moscow with the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Renewed border clashes erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan earlier this week, in the worst fighting since last year’s Nagorno-Karabakh war. Azerbaijan said seven of its soldiers had been killed and 10 wounded in the November 16 fighting. Armenia said six of its soldiers were killed, 13 were captured, and the fate of another 24 servicemen is unknown. Both sides blamed each other for starting the latest hostilities, which ended with another Russian-mediated cease-fire. The violence renewed international calls for the two neighbors to engage in a process of delimitating and demarcating their Soviet-era border. In last year’s war, Baku gained control of parts of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as adjacent territories that had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since the end of a three-year war in 1994. Some 2,000 Russian troops were deployed to monitor the cease-fire in the region. Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL Copyright (c) 2021 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc. 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.