Azerbaijan's president says France is disrupting his country's peace talks with Armenia in light of the country's president joining the effort as a mediator.
Following the most recent EU summit in Moldova, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused French President Emmanuel Macron of misrepresenting the discussion during the peace talks with Armenia.
During the talks between Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday on the sidelines of the European Political Community summit, in an attempt to negotiate a peace treaty, Macron, alongside European Council President Charles Michel and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, joined as mediators.
The Elysée Palace said afterward that the “European leaders called on Armenia and Azerbaijan to respect all their commitments,” as it called on the two neighbors to release prisoners of war and avert "hostile rhetoric".
Macron’s press service stated that the three Western leaders “stressed the importance of defining rights and guarantees for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh", which is the contested region over which Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a brutal war in 2020.
Read more: Macron to Aliyev: allow passage between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh
On Friday, Azerbaijani foreign ministry spokesperson Aykhan Hajizada said Macron's statement about the meeting "does not reflect and distorts the position of the parties. Unfortunately, this is not the first case of such behavior by France, and it does not make a positive contribution to the peace process."
This comes after Aliyev said that there were no serious obstacles to a peace treaty with Armenia on May 28.
In a readout from the meeting, Armenia is aiming for an “international mechanism” to guarantee the safety of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population, after Pashinyan declared willingness back in April to recognize Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over the region governed autonomously by a Yerevan-backed administration since the fall of the Soviet Union.
"Those 86.6 thousand square kilometers also include Nagorno-Karabakh. But we also need to state that the issues of the rights and security of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians have to be discussed in the Baku-Stepanakert format," Pashinyan told a briefing.
He said that he expects Baku to recognize Armenia's sovereign territory of 29.8 thousand square kilometers.
Aliyev continues to insist that local Armenians give up their arms and accept being ruled from his country in return for an “amnesty.”
Before the talks in Moldova, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention wrote to Macron calling on him to prevent a mass exodus of the Nagorno-Karabakh populace, which it described as a potential “genocide.”
Read next: New Armenia-Azerbaijan border clashes, one soldier killed
Macron has been one of Armenia’s closest supporters in the EU and has previously been the subject of derision in Azerbaijan.
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