Three days after the latest Armenian-Azerbaijani summit, Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanian accused Baku on Tuesday of hampering progress towards a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh with “maximalist” demands.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev held a brief meeting in Munich on Saturday before participating in a panel discussion on Karabakh held as part of an annual security conference in the southern German city.
The two leaders publicly traded accusations during the discussion. In particular, Aliyev again described Karabakh as his country’s “integral part” and branded Armenia an “aggressor,” prompting a rebuttal from Pashinian.
Mnatsakanian appeared to refer to this verbal exchange when he discussed the Karabakh peace progress with Toivo Klaar, the European Union’s visiting special envoy for the South Caucasus. According to the Armenian Foreign Ministry, the two men agreed that the conflicting parties should genuinely prepare their populations for peace.
“In that context, the Armenian foreign minister particularly stressed the importance of the leaders publicly sending signals and messages of peace to their societies and pointed out that the Azerbaijani side continues to publicly act from maximalist positions rejecting the rights of the Karabakh people, something which does not allow [the parties] to register progress in the peace process,” the ministry said in a statement.
The Karabakh conflict was also on the agenda of Klaar’s separate meeting with Pashinian. An Armenian government statement said Pashinian shared with the EU envoy his “observations and views” about Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks. It gave no details.
Aliyev and Pashinian met in Munich two weeks after Mnatsakanian and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov concluded two days of negotiations in Geneva held in the presence of U.S., French and Russian mediators.
In a joint statement with the mediators, the ministers said the “intensive discussions” focused on “possible next steps to prepare the populations for peace; principles and elements forming the basis of a future settlement; and timing and agenda for advancing the settlement process.”
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