Azerbaijani leaders regularly accuse Armenia of occupying “eight Azerbaijani villages” and say their liberation is a necessary condition for a peace deal between the two countries. They refer to border areas, most of them enclaves inside Armenia, which were controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by the Armenian army in the early 1990s.
For its part, the Azerbaijani side seized at the time a bigger Armenian enclave as well as large swathes of agricultural land belonging to this and several other border communities of Armenia. It occupied more Armenian territory during border clashes in 2021 and 2022.
The Armenian government says that a total of 200 square kilometers of Armenia’s internationally recognized territory adjacent to 31 Armenian communities is now controlled by Azerbaijan. It says that it is ready, in principle, to consider swapping the formerly Azerbaijani enclaves for those lands or seek other compromise solutions. Baku denies occupying any Armenian territory.
“Of course, we will not take a single step back from our positions [occupied in] both May 2021 and September 2022 because that border must be established,” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said recently. What is more, he demanded that Armenia first withdraw from four of the “Azerbaijani villages” that were not enclaves.
Grigorian’s office specified those villages in a statement to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. They all are located in Armenia’s northern Tavush province. The office confirmed that Baku is refusing to withdraw from any Armenian territory in return for their handover to Azerbaijan.
Sargis Khandanian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on foreign relations, rejected the Azerbaijani demands as “unacceptable.” He reiterated Yerevan’s insistence on using the most recent Soviet military maps to delimit the long border between the two South Caucasus countries. Baku rejects the idea backed by the European Union.
Not surprisingly, there has been little progress in Armenian-Azerbaijani talks on the border delimitation held so far. The most recent round of those talks co-chaired by Grigorian and his Azerbaijani counterpart Shahin Mustfayev took place in late January.
The lingering border disputes are a key hurdle to the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. Senior Azerbaijani officials have said in recent months that the two sides should sign it before agreeing on the delimitation. By contrast, Yerevan maintains that the treaty must spell out legally binding principles of the delimitation process.