Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed on fundamental principles for a peace treaty to permanently end the decadeslong hostilities between the two Caucasus neighbors, Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Saturday, noting that they were still speaking "different diplomatic languages."
"We have good and bad news about the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process," TASS quoted Pashinyan as saying in Yerevan.
"It is good that the basic principles of peace with Azerbaijan have been agreed.
"This happened through the mediation of the head of the European Council, Charles Michel, as a result of my meetings with Azerbaijan's president in Brussels," Pashinyan said.
"The most important bad news is that we still speak different diplomatic languages and very often do not understand each other," Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan said Armenia had also proposed swapping all Armenian prisoners for all Azerbaijani prisoners, TASS reported.
The two countries continue to speak "different diplomatic languages" because they do not understand each other, Pashinyan said at the opening of the parliamentary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Armenia's capital of Yerevan.
The Armenian leader also said the two countries' protracted conflict over the Karabakh region is taking its toll.
Pashinyan's remarks came the day after a U.N. International Criminal Court hearing on Armenia's lawsuit against Azerbaijan.
Armenia accuses Baku of violating the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination due to the recent escalation of tensions in Karabakh, though U.N. agencies earlier categorically stated that they had not recorded any cases of Azerbaijan's discriminatory attitude toward Armenians.
In September, Armenia ratified the Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court, to sue Azerbaijan over its actions in Karabakh.
Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been tense since 1991 when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan and seven adjacent regions.
Most of the territory was liberated by Azerbaijan during a war in the fall of 2020, which ended after a Russian-brokered peace agreement and also opened the door to normalization.
This September, the Azerbaijani army initiated an anti-terrorism operation in Karabakh to establish a constitutional order, after which illegal separatist forces in the region surrendered.
