Russia is not torpedoing U.S. efforts to broker an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord despite being strongly opposed to them, the U.S. State Department insisted on Thursday.
Moscow has repeatedly claimed that the United States and the European Union are seeking to drive it out of the South Caucasus, rather than end the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
In early December, the Russian Foreign Ministry also rebuked Armenia for ignoring recent Russian offers to organize more peace talks with Azerbaijan. It warned that Yerevan’s current preference of Western mediation may spell more trouble for the Armenian people.
“Russia does not in any way prevent us from conducting the important diplomatic efforts we think are necessary for Armenia and Azerbaijan, and we will continue to pursue them,” Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, told a news briefing in Washington.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to host the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers in Washington on November 20 for further negotiations on a peace treaty between the two South Caucasus nations. Baku cancelled the meeting in protest against what it called pro-Armenian statements made by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.
O’Brien visited Baku afterwards in what appears to have been a failed bid to convince the Azerbaijani leadership to reschedule the cancelled meeting. Miller indicated that no new date has been agreed for it yet.
“We’ll have an announcement to make when we have a meeting scheduled,” he said.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, said on December 19 that Washington must reconsider its “one-sided approach” to the conflict before it can mediate more peace talks.
On December 28, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov revealed that Baku has proposed that he and his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan hold direct talks at the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The Armenian government has still not publicly responded to the offer.
In an interview with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung published on Thursday, Hajiyev said Baku and Yerevan do not need third-party mediation in order to negotiate the peace treaty. “We are not against honest mediation in principle but prefer direct discussions,” he said.
Armenian analysts have suggested that Baku does not want Western mediation anymore because it is reluctant to sign the kind of agreement that would commit it to explicitly recognizing Armenia’s borders and thus preclude Azerbaijani territorial claims.
Yerevan has said, at least until now, that the two sides should use Soviet military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for recognizing each other’s territorial integrity and delimiting the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Its position has been backed by the EU but rejected by the Azerbaijani side.
Source: Azatutyun.am
