A military post along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Armenia’s Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan said on Tuesday that Azerbaijan’s ongoing insistence on a so-called “corridor” through Armenia is a “red line” for Yerevan.

Grigoryan, who sits on a joint commission with his Azerbaijani and Russian counterparts tasked with opening transport links and delimiting of the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, told reporters that the issue of a “corridor” will not be discussed during upcoming meeting because “it is a red line for us.”

He said that in discussing the opening of borders with Azerbaijan Armenia is moving forward with two succinctly important principles that ensure that the infrastructures agreed to during talks must be in complete completely sovereign and under complete jurisdiction of Armenia.

When the Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan met in Moscow earlier this month at the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, they agreed that stalled talks on the opening of transport routes and the delimitation of borders should resume immediately.

One such element is restoring of the out of commission Soviet railway lines, the restoration of which, according to Grigoryan, will take two to three years. He called the railroad link an “effective” solution to the unblocking of regional transport routes.

“We want solutions that would strengthen and enhance Armenia’s role in the region as a logistic hub. At this moment the railway option seems to be the most likely one. If we look at the railway infrastructures in the region, it is clear that by restoring individual sections we would get a serious logistic solution on a regional level. By very preliminary calculations the restoration could take approximately two to three years,” Grigoryan said.

The transit route unblocking commission is scheduled to meet later this week, Grigoryan told reporters.