Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigorian and his Azerbaijani counterpart Shahin Mustafayev head commissions on border demarcation and delimitation set up by their governments this spring. They chaired the first joint session of the two commissions in May.
The latest session was arranged and facilitated by European Union officials, including Toivo Klaar, the EU’s special envoy to the South Caucasus.
Stefano Sannino, the secretary general of the EU’s External Action Service, greeted the Armenian and Azerbaijani officials at the start of the meeting.
“The European Union urges the sides to take steps to improve security on the ground and to achieve progress on delimitation,” Sannino tweeted afterwards.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said that the two sides “continued discussing delimitation issues” in view of understandings reached by Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s leaders “in different formats.”
They addressed “organizational and procedural issues” and agreed to speed up efforts to work out practical modalities of their joint work, the ministry said in a statement. No other details were reported.
Both the EU and Russia have been trying to facilitate the delimitation process. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday again expressed readiness to provide Soviet-era military maps for that purpose.
Armen Grigorian, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, said on October 12 that Baku and Yerevan are planning to both complete the delimitation and sign a bilateral peace treaty before the end of this year. He said they reached such understandings during high-level peace talks that followed the September 13-14 fighting on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
The talks were organized by the EU and the United States.