U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for peace in separate phone calls with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on Monday.

Blinken discussed the efforts to achieve peace in the region, the U.S. State Department said.

Earlier this month, the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers held bilateral talks for the first time since the 2020 war between the archrivals over the Karabakh region, previously referred to as Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars – in 2020 and in the 1990s – over Azerbaijan's region of Karabakh, which was illegally occupied by Armenia. In December, the two countries appointed special envoys to help normalize relations, a year after Armenia lost to Turkey's ally Azerbaijan.

Six weeks of fighting in autumn 2020 claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended with a Russian-brokered cease-fire agreement.

Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of Azerbaijani territory it had illegally occupied for decades and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.

Following its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, increasingly isolated Moscow may be losing its status as a primary mediator in the conflict.

Turkey and the European Union have since led the Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization process, which involves peace talks, border delimitation and the reopening of transport links.

Aliyev and Pashinian met in Brussels in April and May and European Council President Charles Michel has said their next meeting is scheduled for July or August.