Peace Talks Advance After Azerbaijan’s Recapture of Karabakh, Moving Closer to a Treaty to End Decades-Long Hostilities
Armenian and Azerbaijani officials have announced that they have agreed on the text of a peace agreement aimed at ending nearly four decades of conflict between the two South Caucasus nations. This marks a significant breakthrough in a peace process that has been intermittent and often contentious.
The two post-Soviet countries have been engaged in a series of wars since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan with a predominantly ethnic Armenian population at the time, sought to break away from Azerbaijan with Armenia’s support.
On Thursday, Armenia’s Foreign Ministry stated that it had finalized a draft peace agreement with Azerbaijan. “The peace agreement is ready for signing. The Republic of Armenia is ready to begin consultations with the Republic of Azerbaijan on the date and location for signing the agreement,” the ministry said in a statement.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry also expressed satisfaction, stating, “We note with satisfaction that the negotiations on the text of the draft Agreement on Peace and the Establishment of Interstate Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been concluded.”
However, the timeline for signing the agreement remains uncertain. Azerbaijan has stated that a prerequisite for its signature is a change to Armenia’s constitution, which it claims implicitly asserts territorial claims over Azerbaijan. Armenia denies these allegations, but Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly emphasized in recent months that the country’s founding document needs to be replaced and has called for a referendum to achieve this. No date has been set for such a referendum.
The conflict, which began in the late 1980s, led to the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim Azeris from Armenia and predominantly Christian Armenians from Azerbaijan.
Peace talks gained momentum after Azerbaijan retook Karabakh by force in September 2023, prompting nearly all of the region’s 100,000 Armenians to flee to Armenia. Both sides have expressed a desire to sign a treaty to end the long-standing conflict, but progress has been slow, and relations remain tense.
The 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) shared border between the two countries is closed and heavily militarized. In January, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused Armenia of posing a “fascist” threat that needed to be destroyed, a statement that Armenia’s leader interpreted as a potential justification for renewed conflict.
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