RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that “strictly technical” issues remain in resolving one of the main disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, neighbours previously in conflict over contested territory.
President Putin met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Moscow, discussing a dispute over a winding road called the Lachin Corridor.
The route is the only authorised connection between Armenia and the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, and is a lifeline for supplies to the region’s approximately 120,000 people.
President Aliyev and Premier Pashinyan, in a broader regional summit meeting Mr Putin hosted in Moscow, lashed out at each other for their positions regarding the land corridor.
But President Putin said that on the “principal issues, there is an agreement,” and later said all that remained were “surmountable obstacles,” calling them differences in terminology and “strictly technical.”
He said representatives of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan would meet in a week to try to resolve the remaining differences.
According to the Russian state news agency Tass, Mr Pashinyan said last Wednesday that Armenia and Azerbaijan recognise each other’s territorial integrity within Soviet administrative borders.
It added that on Monday, Mr Pashinyan said the territory of Azerbaijan that his government is ready to recognise includes Nagorno-Karabakh.
Mr Pashinyan said on Thursday: “I want to confirm that Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed on mutual recognition of each other’s territorial integrity, and on this basis we can say that we are moving quite well towards settlement of our relations.”
Mr Aliyev said on Thursday that the Armenian leader’s statements ensure that “the issue of agreeing on other points of the peace treaty will go much easier, because it was the main factor on which we could not come to an agreement.”
President Putin told the leaders a key sign of progress is “an agreement on the fundamental issue of territorial integrity.”
He added: “And this is in fact the basis for agreeing on other issues of a secondary nature.”
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a war over Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 that killed more than 6,000 people.
The war ended in a Russia-brokered armistice under which Armenia relinquished territories surrounding the region. Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan, but ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia had controlled the region and surrounding territories since 1994.
Azerbaijan has repeatedly alleged that Armenians have used the Lachin Corridor to bring weapons and ammunition into Nagorno-Karabakh in violation of the armistice terms.