Armenia Offers Peace Treaty Project to Azerbaijan

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Facts

• Armenia's PM Nikol Pashinyan announced on Thursday that a project for a full peace treaty to end the decades-long dispute over the Caucasus' Nagorno-Karabakh region has been presented to Azerbaijan.¹
• The draft document has also been handed over to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's (OSCE) Minsk Group co-chairing countries; the US, Russia, and France.¹
• This comes two days after the Kremlin stated that Vladimir Putin had stressed to his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, the importance of ensuring stability and security in the southern Caucasus.²
• Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ayxan Hajizada, however, reacted by claiming that Armenia has proposed an 'unacceptable' international mechanism to reintegrate Armenians living in Karabakh and hasn't yet given up its allegedly unlawful territorial claims against Azerbaijan.³
• The former Soviet republics have fought two wars for control of Azerbaijan's ethnic Armenian-majority enclave, killing over 35K people, and Yerevan has recently accused Baku of ethnic cleansing and forcing Armenians to leave the region as Azerbaijani environmental activists block the only road linking Karabakh to Armenia.⁴
• On Wednesday, Armenia's FM Ararat Mirzoyan declared that Yerevan is ready to restore peace and fully normalize relations with Turkey, which closed its borders with Armenia in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and backed Baku in the 2020 offensive.⁵

Sources: ¹Al Jazeera, ²Reuters, ³Azernews.az, ⁴Barrons and ⁵Eac news.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Jerusalem post. This peace treaty project displays Armenia's long-standing commitment to restoring peace in the Caucasus, which Azerbaijan has so far failed to meet. It's Azerbaijan's occupation of the Armenian sovereign territory and aggressiveness toward Armenians that is blocking peace, not Armenia. If Baku is indeed pragmatic and serious about peace, there's nothing impeding its return to negotiations.
• Narrative B, as provided by Newsweek. This proposal is yet another political stunt made by Yerevan to try to deceive foreign powers into putting pressure on Baku in a cynical game of power politics that uses ethnic Armenians in Karabakh merely as pawns. There is no commitment to peace in this offering as Armenia has once again engaged in negotiations to play for time as it seeks to prepare its troops for a new offensive.

Predictions