The heads of diplomacy from Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Geneva on Sunday to discuss peace talks as recent border clashes have jeopardized the nascent normalization process between the two countries.
The meeting between Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan started shortly after 7 p.m. (5 p.m. GMT) in a large hotel in Geneva, not far from the UN headquarters, the Palais des Nations.
The start of the meeting was announced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan in a tweet, accompanied by photos on which we can see the two delegations, seated face to face, in a room with closed curtains.
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Last month, at least 286 people were killed on both sides before a US-brokered truce ended the worst clashes since the 2020 war between neighbors in the Caucasus.
Baku and Yerevan have clashed twice, in 2020 and in the 1990s, over the sovereignty of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated enclave in Azerbaijan.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Friday that his foreign minister and his Azerbaijani counterpart were to meet in Geneva
“to begin substantive discussions regarding the text of a peace agreement.”
The two Foreign Ministers already met on September 20 in New York (United States), within the framework of discussions conducted under the mediation of the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
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Yerevan said three Armenian soldiers were killed in border clashes last week, blaming Azerbaijan for instigating them and demanding the deployment of an international observer mission on the ground.
The 2020 war, which lasted six weeks, claimed the lives of more than 6,500 soldiers on both sides and ended in a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Armenia has ceded swathes of territory it has controlled for decades and Moscow has deployed some 2,000 Russian soldiers to watch over this fragile truce.
During EU-led negotiations in Brussels in April and May, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan agreed to
"advance the talks"
on a future peace treaty.
They met for the last time in Brussels on August 31, during discussions mediated by the President of the European Council Charles Michel.
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