WASHINGTON, DC — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Armenia and Azerbaijan may soon reach a peace agreement.
Speaking Wednesday at a hearing held in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Blinken said he believes that there is such a possibility in achieving a peace agreement.
“I’ve been very engaged on seeing what we can do to help Armenia and Azerbaijan come to a peace agreement that normalizes the relationship between them, as well as deal with obviously the rights and protections for the Armenian ethnics in Nagorno Karabakh, dealing with border delimitation, etcetera. And I think there’s an opportunity, I don’t want to exaggerate it, but an opportunity actually to bring a peace agreement to fruition. I had Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev together in Munich at the Security Conference, I had the Foreign Ministers here in Washington, I expect that they’ll come back, we worked on a text and this is not something that we are imposing on Armenia, we are answering the strong desire expressed by Armenia to see if we can help them reach an agreement which would end, at least in many ways, thirty plus years of conflict,” Secretary Blinken said in response to question from the committee chairman Bob Menendez.
Blinken said there are “real problems in the Lachin corridor with the ability of people, private citizens, commercial traffic to get what’s needed to the people in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
“I am pressing on Azerbaijan, including as recently as this week, to re-open that corridor. We are working on that,” the US Secretary of State said, referring to the “real problems in Lachin Corridor”.
“I do think there is without exaggeration a moment of opportunity that would profoundly be in the interests of the people of Armenia, as well as Azerbaijan,” Blinken concluded.
