Armenia PM Hopes For Azerbaijan Peace Deal 'in Coming Months'

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Thursday he hoped to sign a peace agreement with Azerbaijan in the coming months, after Baku recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh from ethnic-Armenian separatists in September.

Tbilisi, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 26th Oct, 2023) Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Thursday he hoped to sign a peace agreement with Azerbaijan in the coming months, after Baku recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh from ethnic-Armenian separatists in September.

Yerevan and Baku have been locked in a decades-long conflict for control of Azerbaijan's Armenian-populated region of Karabakh.

Baku reclaimed the mountainous enclave in late September in a 24-hour offensive that ended decades of Armenian separatist rule.

"We are currently working on the draft agreement with Azerbaijan on peace and the normalisation of relations, and I hope this process will successfully conclude in the coming months," said Pashinyan.

The future peace treaty would be based on the mutual recognition of the Caucasus neighbours' Soviet-era borders, he told an international economic forum in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said a peace treaty with Yerevan could be signed by the end of the year.

Yerevan had expressed fears that energy-rich Baku might try to press its advantage.

Its concern is that it might - with the help of ally Turkey -- seek to forcibly connect its Nakhichevan exclave with Azerbaijan proper by capturing lands in southern Armenia, the so-called Zangezur corridor along the Iranian border.

It has also accused Baku of "ethnic cleansing" as almost all of Karabakh's ethnic Armenian population -- some 100,000 people -- fled for Armenia after Baku's lightning offensive, sparking a refugee crisis.