YEREVAN — Deputy prime ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan met on Tuesday for the first round of negotiations on demarcating the long and heavily militarized border between the two states.

Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Shahin Mustafayev held the talks at an undisclosed section of the border one day after being appointed as chairmen of separate Armenian and Azerbaijani government commissions on the border demarcation.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry said they discussed “procedural and organizational issues relating to joint activities of the commissions.” Grigoryan and Mustafayev decided to hold their next meetings in Moscow and Brussels, the ministry said without giving dates.

The two men have also co-headed, together with Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk, a Russian-Armenian-Azerbaijani working group dealing with practical modalities of opening transport links between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The group has not met since December.

Grigoryan’s meeting with Mustafayev came two days after the latest Armenian-Azerbaijani summit hosted by European Council President Charles Michel in Brussels. Michel said Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev agreed to launch the demarcation process “in the coming days.”

The process is meant to end long-running border disputes and skirmishes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces that have broken out regularly throughout the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It was supposed to get underway shortly after Aliyev’s and Pashinyan’s trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin held in Sochi last November.

1 comment
Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign Up for Our Newsletters

Get notified of the latest updates from MassisPost.

You May Also Like

Ninth Anniversary of Hrant Dink Assassination Commemorated

ISTANBUL — Hrant Dink, the Istanbul-Armenian journalist killed in 2007, was commemorated…

Armenia Placed Second in Junior Eurovision Song Contest

MALTA — Georgia has won Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2016. The country…

Investigators Seek to Question Kocharian Over 2008 Crackdown

YEREVAN — Investigators have summoned former President Robert Kocharian for questioning in…

Society for Armenian Studies to Hold Annual Meeting and Conference on Western Armenian

WASHINGTON, DC — An international conference, “Transmitting Western Armenian to the Next…