• AFP, YEREVAN

Armenia and Azerbaijan are preparing for peace talks, officials in both countries said yesterday, after a flareup last month in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region over which they fought a war in 2020.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met on Wednesday in Brussels for rare talks mediated by European Council President Charles Michel.

The meeting came after a flareup in Karabakh on March 25 in which Azerbaijan captured a strategic village in the area under Russian peacekeepers’ responsibility, killing three separatist troops.

During the meeting, the two leaders “ordered foreign ministers to begin preparatory work for peace talks between the two countries,” the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

“An agreement was reached during the meeting” to establish a “commission on the issues of delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijan border, which will be in charge of ensuring security and stability along the frontier,” it said.

Azerbaijan also said that works are under way to begin peace talks, adding that a peace treaty would be based “on the basic principles proposed earlier by Azerbaijan.”

Michel “noted both President Aliyev’s and Prime Minister Pashinyan’s stated desire to move rapidly towards a peace agreement between their countries,” the EU said in a statement.

“It was agreed to instruct Ministers of Foreign Affairs to work on the preparation of a future peace treaty, which would address all necessary issues,” the statement said.

After the March incident, Moscow and Yerevan accused Azerbaijan of a ceasefire contravention, a charge Baku has rejected, insisting its troops are in Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory.

Yerevan also called on Baku to start peace talks “without delay.”

Baku agreed, saying it had put forward such a proposal a year ago.

Baku in the middle of last month proposed a framework for the peace agreement that includes both sides’ mutual recognition of territorial integrity, meaning Yerevan should agree on Karabakh being part of Azerbaijan.

Armenian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ararat Mirzoyan sparked controversy at home when he said, commenting on the Azerbaijani proposal, that for Yerevan “the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not a territorial issue, but a matter of rights” of the local ethnic-Armenian population.

Long-contested between the Caucasus neighbours, Karabakh was at the centre of a war in 2020 that claimed more than 6,500 lives before it ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Armenia in the pact ceded swathes of territories it had controlled for decades in what was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation, sparking weeks of mass anti-government protests.

Several thousand opposition supporters on Tuesday rallied in Yerevan to warn the government against concessions on Karabakh.

Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflicts claimed about 30,000 lives.