U.S. Signals Another Armenian-Azeri Summit

WASHINGTON, DC — Armenia and Azerbaijan will hold further high-level negotiations “in the coming days” to try to build on “significant progress” made by them in recent months, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday.

“This [progress] has been the result of … trilateral engagement with the United States, the work that the EU has done in their diplomacy as well, and what we hope to see when the parties come together in Brussels in the coming days in the talks hosted by President [Charles] Michel of the EU,” the department spokesman, Ned Price, told a news briefing in Washington.

“So, we hope to see a continuation of that progress,” he said. “We are not being Pollyannaish, but we are continuing to support this dialogue, this diplomacy, towards a comprehensive solution in every way we possibly can.”

Price did not specify whether Michel will hold a trilateral meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The head of the European Union’s top decision-making body hosted a series of talks between them last year.

The Armenian government would not say on Thursday whether the two leaders are indeed scheduled to meet in Brussels. A government spokesman told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that he has “no information about the meeting at the moment.”

Aliyev and Pashinian met in Munich as recently as on Saturday for talks organized by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. They reportedly concentrated on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty discussed by the two sides for the past year.