No regress in Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks - Alen Simonyan

YEREVAN, January 15. /ARKA/. There is no regression in Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations on normalization of relations, Armenian National Assembly Speaker Alen Simonyan said.

According to him, the sides are discussing the agreement point by point, exchanging packages of proposals, and Prime Minister Pashinyan's recent comments that statements by the Azerbaijani leadership threaten the advancement of the peace agenda were a manifestation of surprise, "because the rhetoric of the Azerbaijani side often goes beyond the conversations, proposals and documents being discussed, which is incomprehensible."

On January 10, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said that Azerbaijan's position on some points of the peace treaty has regressed, noting that the proposals sent by Armenia on January 4 were very constructive.

Asked why Azerbaijan does not recognize Armenia's territorial integrity, while Armenia has repeatedly made statements recognizing Azerbaijan's territorial integration, Simonyan said that "the president of Azerbaijan personally made public statements on Armenia's territorial integrity more than once, although he did not mention that it is 29,800 square kilometers, but we expect this to happen as well."

On January 10, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that Baku does not agree with Yerevan's proposal to delimit the Armenian-Azerbaijani border on the basis of maps from the 1970s. As a condition for opening the border with Armenia, he called the launch of the so-called "Zangezur corridor" so that people and goods from the western regions of Azerbaijan would go to Nakhichevan through Armenia without any inspection. Aliyev also refused to withdraw Azerbaijani troops from Armenia's sovereign territories occupied between May 2021 and September 2022.

On January 13, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called Aliyev's statements a serious blow to the peace process. He recalled that the Armenian side has repeatedly stated that peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as demarcation and delimitation of borders should be based on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration.

According to him, these agreements between Armenia and Azerbaijan were voiced during the Prague meeting on October 6, 2022 with the resulting quadripartite declaration, at a meeting in Sochi the same month, and at a trilateral meeting in Brussels on July 15.

Pashinyan argues that Baku's latest high-level statements directly contradict this logic and this agreement. -0-