Armenia and Azerbaijan will have to discuss a lot of issues, in particular the need to unblock the Lachin corridor, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said on Tuesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th July, 2023) Armenia and Azerbaijan will have to discuss a lot of issues, in particular the need to unblock the Lachin corridor, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said on Tuesday.
"I am grateful for the strong commitment of the EU and the talks in Washington. It is going in the right direction and I hope that one day there will be a sustainable peace agreement. However, there are still many open questions that need to be discussed. Among them, there is a humanitarian concern that greatly worries us - the blockade of the Lachin corridor. This blockade must end!" Schallenberg said after the meeting with his Armenian counterpart, Ararat Mirzoyan, in Vienna, as quoted by the Austrian Foreign Ministry.
On April 23, Azerbaijan's State Border Service said it had established a border checkpoint at the entrance to the Lachin corridor, the only land route linking Armenia and the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Baku cited Armenia's alleged illegal use of the road and security concerns, noting that the Russian peacekeeping contingent and the Russian-Turkish monitoring center had been informed about this. Yerevan protested Baku's move, stressing that it violated the 2020 trilateral declaration.
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.
In 2022, Yerevan and Baku, mediated by Russia, the United States and the European Union, began discussing a future peace treaty. In May 2023, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that Yerevan was ready to recognize Azerbaijan's 86,600 square kilometers (33,430 square miles) territorial integrity that also includes Nagorno-Karabakh. If Armenia does not change its position on the issue, Baku and Yerevan may sign a peace treaty in the near future, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said.
