The United States was set to host talks between foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan as the two neighbors engaged in a bitter conflict in the past negotiate a peace agreement.
The Caucasus rivals fought two wars, in the 1990s and in 2020, over control of Azerbaijan's Karabakh region. Last autumn, Baku recaptured the mountainous enclave in a one-day offensive. Years of internationally mediated peace talks between Baku and Yerevan have failed to produce a breakthrough, but the two countries' leaders said recently that a comprehensive peace deal is within reach.
"A trilateral meeting between Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be held on July 10," Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ani Badalyan said. The meeting will take place on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington, she added. The meeting was listed on Blinken's official schedule for Wednesday, 10:15 a.m. (2:15 p.m. GMT), according to the U.S. Department of State's website.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. continues "to work for a diplomatic resolution" of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict but refused to provide further details about the planned talks. Blinken has led repeated talks between the countries in hopes of averting further conflict. Last week, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said his country "needs a new constitution" because the current one "doesn't reflect citizens' vision of the relations with neighboring countries." The statement came in response to Baku's demand that Yerevan remove from its Constitution a reference to the country's 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, which proclaims Armenia's unification with Karabakh as a national goal.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said that reaching a peace agreement with Armenia is impossible until Armenia removes territorial claims to Karabakh from its Constitution. In May, Armenia returned to Azerbaijan four border villages that it had occupied decades earlier, with Pashinyan saying the move was part of his efforts to secure peace with Azerbaijan. Last month, Pashinyan said Yerevan was ready to sign a peace agreement with Baku "within a month." Aliyev said last week that the text of the agreement could be finalized within a matter of several months.
