Armenia could agree terms on a comprehensive peace agreement with neighboring Azerbaijan, ending a bitter regional rivalry after three decades of hostilities, the South Caucasus country’s prime minister said Thursday.
Speaking at a conference in Georgia, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that his government could sign “an agreement on peace and the establishment of relationships” with its neighbor “in the coming months.”
At the same time, he unveiled a “Crossroads of Peace” project designed to reopen road and railway links that have been blocked for decades amid the simmering conflict with Azerbaijan and its close ally, Turkey.
The announcement comes just weeks after Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive to take control of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been fought over by the two sides since the fall of the USSR. An estimated 100,000 ethnic Armenians living in the mountainous territory were forced to flee their homes as their unrecognized breakaway state collapsed after 30 years of de facto autonomy.
On Tuesday, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said the decisive military action means there are now “real chances for the conclusion of a peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia within a short period of time.”
At the same time, Azerbaijan’s foreign policy chief told POLITICO that his country had no plans to use force to seize territory across the internationally recognized border, despite claims a new conflict over transport routes could be imminent.
Previous efforts to mediate between the two former Soviet republics by the U.S., the EU and Russia have failed to prevent violence in the past, with discussion on issues like transport connectivity and border demarcation ending in deadlock.
“For long years, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict has been the major stumbling block for the regional integration and the utilization of all the potential of the South Caucasus,” said Vasif Huseynov, head of department at Azerbaijan’s AIR Center think tank. “It has immensely increased the costs of the regional projects, both connectivity and energy pipelines. This is one of the reasons why it is in the interest of Baku to put an end to this conflict.”
However expectations are more muted in Yerevan, according to Tigran Grigoryan, head of Armenia’s Regional Center for Democracy and Security.
“There is too much importance put on the peace treaty,” he said. “It’s obvious for me the treaty isn’t the end of any process and even if something is signed, Azerbaijan will continue pursuing a maximalist approach and will keep pressuring Armenia to get everything it wants out of that process.”
Last month, Pashinyan told POLITICO that Russian peacekeepers had failed in Nagorno-Karabakh, and that it was time to resolve issues with his country’s neighbors directly, rather than depending on Moscow for support. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, he reiterated the need to “diversify our relationships in the security sphere” and hinted that he no longer sees a purpose for Russia’s military bases on Armenian soil.