Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Monday that Yerevan is ready to recognize Azerbaijan's territory of 86.6 thousand square kilometers (33.4 thousand square miles), including the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh
YEREVAN (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd May, 2023) Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Monday that Yerevan is ready to recognize Azerbaijan's territory of 86.6 thousand square kilometers (33.4 thousand square miles), including the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh.
In April, Pashinyan said that Armenia was ready to recognize Azerbaijan's territorial integrity within the borders of the former Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic.
"Those 86.6 thousand square kilometers also include Nagorno-Karabakh. But we also need to state that the issues of the rights and security of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians have to be discussed in the Baku-Stepanakert format," Pashinyan told a briefing.
The Armenian leader said that Armenia was willing to recognize Azerbaijan's borders and considered Baku ready to recognize the integrity of Armenia's territory of 29.8 thousand square kilometers.
At the same time, Pashinyan stressed that guarantees were needed to ensure no ethnic purges and genocide against the Karabakh Armenians existed.
In turn, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that the signing of a peace treaty between Baku and Yerevan was inevitable.
Last week, Pashinyan said that Yerevan had accepted Russia's proposal to hold a trilateral summit of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan in Moscow on May 25.
On February 18, 2023, Aliyev and Pashinyan held peace talks in Munich. Following the negotiations, Aliyev said that the main issue was that the peace treaty between the two countries should be drawn up on the basis of international norms and principles, and that any provisions on Nagorno-Karabakh were unacceptable.
The decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh flared up in September 2020, marking the worst escalation since the 1990s. Hostilities ended with a Russia-brokered trilateral ceasefire declaration signed in November 2020. The two former Soviet states agreed to the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in the region. Since then, there have been occasional clashes along the border.
