BAKU/TBILISI (Reuters) -Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will meet in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, their governments said, to work to finalise a peace agreement after nearly four decades of conflict.
The South Caucasus countries have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
In a major breakthrough, the countries said in March they had finalised a draft peace deal. But the timeline for signing it remains uncertain and ceasefire violations along their closed and heavily militarised border surged soon after the draft deal was announced. There have been no reported violations recently.
The meeting in Abu Dhabi will be the two leaders’ first formal encounter since they agreed on the draft text of the peace agreement.
Pashinyan, in a rare bilateral visit to Turkey last month, met President Tayyip Erdogan, who said he would support Yerevan’s peace efforts with Baku. The United States has also recently signalled its hopes for a deal.
Peace talks began after Azerbaijan recaptured Karabakh in September 2023, prompting almost all of the territory’s 100,000 Armenians to flee to Armenia.
In a potential stumbling block to a deal, Azerbaijan has said it wants Armenia to change its constitution, which it says makes implicit claims to its territory.
Yerevan denies this, but Pashinyan has repeatedly stressed – most recently this week – that the South Caucasus country’s founding charter needs to be updated.
Azerbaijan also asked for a transport corridor through Armenia, linking the bulk of its territory to Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani enclave that borders Baku’s ally Turkey.
Pashinyan and Aliyev last met in May on the sidelines of the European Political Community summit in Tirana. They discussed the peace process, but their meeting – a chat around a coffee table – was informal.
(Reporting by Reuters; writing by Lucy Papachristou; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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