Baku, Yerevan agreed on fundamental points of peace treaty

“An agreement has been reached on the principle points. There are five of them. They include the recognition of one another’s territorial integrity, the demarcation of borders, etc. It remains only to implement them,” Cavusoglu said in an interview with Turkey’s tvnet on Tuesday.

The Turkish diplomat also reiterated that the peace agreement talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia and negotiations on the normalization of relations between Yerevan and Ankara cannot take place separately from one another. “We have spoken about this repeatedly,” Cavusoglu said, according to Sputnik.

He added that Turkey is “sincere” in its desire to normalize ties.

The foreign minister indicated that the talks between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Prague last week were “positive.”

Erdogan and Pashinyan met in the Czech capital on October 6, on the sidelines of a summit of the European Political Community – a new multinational organization designed to facilitate regional cooperation created on the proposal of French President Emmanuel Macron in May. Pashinyan also met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the summit.

Tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan have escalated in recent weeks amid back-and-forth accusations of violations of a ceasefire in a border conflict that began in May 2021. That conflict saw a dramatic escalation between September 12-14 before a shaky ceasefire. Each side blamed the other for the escalation.

Conflict first broke out in the late 1980s, when both sides were under Soviet rule and Armenian forces captured swathes of territory near Karabakh, long recognized internationally as Azerbaijan’s territory.

Azerbaijan regained those territories in the 2020 fighting, which ended with a Russian-brokered truce and thousands of residents returning to homes from which they had fled. More than 6,500 people lost their lives in the six-week war.

The leaders of both countries have since met several times to hammer out a treaty intended to establish a lasting peace.

ZZ/PR