Responding to media requests for information, Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vahan Hunanian said late on Monday that “proposals for meetings in different formats are being discussed.”
“When an agreement is reached on the date, place and format, we will inform you about it in advance, within a reasonable timeframe,” he added.
Earlier, citing a person believed to have ties with ruling circles in both Armenia and Russia, the Pastinfo website reported that a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will take place in the Russian resort town of Sochi on November 26.
Reports about a possible Russia-hosted Armenian-Azerbaijani summit come days after Yerevan and Baku confirmed that the two South Caucasus leaders had accepted the European Union’s proposal for a meeting on the sidelines of the Eastern Partnership summit in Brussels on December 15.
The announcement of the Brussels meeting was followed by a phone call between Pashinian and Putin on November 21 in which the two sides, according to the Kremlin, discussed “the situation in the region and measures aimed at stabilizing the situation in the context of the agreements reached on Nagorno-Karabakh on November 9, 2020 and January 11, 2021.”
The flurry of international diplomatic activity around Armenia and Azerbaijan comes on the heels of another major escalation along the border between the two countries that last year fought a 44-day war over Nagorno-Karabakh stopped due to a Russia-brokered ceasefire.
On November 18, just two days after Armenian-Azerbaijani border clashes in which at least 13 troops were killed before they were stopped through Russia’s mediation, Pashinian publicly accepted what appeared to be fresh proposals from Moscow on starting the process of demarcating and delimitating the Soviet-era border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Baku has not commented on the reported Russian offer yet.