Baku Unwilling to Sign Peace Deal

YEREVAN — Azerbaijan is setting various preconditions to avoid signing a peace treaty with Armenia, Sargis Khandanyan, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on foreign relations, said on Friday.

“Azerbaijan’s leadership is publicly setting preconditions which cannot become a subject of negotiations in any way because it’s first and foremost an internal issue [for Armenia,]” Khandanyan said in reference to Baku’s demands for a change of Armenia’s constitution.

“They may raise the constitution issue now and may raise another issue tomorrow obviously not because it’s really an issue for them but because there is no desire to sign the peace treaty,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov have repeatedly stated that the signing of the treaty is conditional of Armenia changing its constitution which they say contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan. Bayramov reiterated this precondition in the run-up to Wednesday’s talks with his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington.

According to the U.S. State Department, Blinken urged the two sides to take “further steps to finalize a deal as soon as possible.” He similarly told Aliyev last month that the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict should be settled “without delay.”