YEREVAN — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Thursday that he and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev did not achieve “concrete results” at their latest meeting hosted by European Union chief Charles Michel on July 15.
Pashinyan said they discussed mutual recognition of Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, delimitation of the border and transport links between the two states as well as the deepening humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh caused by Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin corridor. He made no explicit mention of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty, the main focus of peace talks held by Baku and Yerevan in recent months.
“As you can see, I cannot present very concrete results from the Brussels meeting,” Pashinyan told his ministers during a weekly cabinet meeting. “Nevertheless, the negotiation process should continue as intensively as possible and active efforts should be made to find mutually acceptable solutions.”
Speaking after the trilateral meeting, Michel gave no indications that Aliyev and Pashinyan narrowed their differences on the peace treaty. He said he urged them to “take further courageous steps to ensure decisive and irreversible progress on the normalization track.”
Pashinyan said the meeting “did not yield any concrete results in terms of opening the Lachin corridor and overcoming the humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.” He again charged that ethnic cleansing is the ultimate aim of the Azerbaijani blockade.
“At the moment, our task is to draw greater international attention to the humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh through diplomatic methods and by presenting the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh in the international press and social media as widely and objectively as possible,” he said.
