In the lead-up to this year’s NATO Summit in Washington D.C., it was uncertain whether Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov would meet. However, a last-minute announcement confirmed that they would, albeit not in a bilateral format, but with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Expectations were low, given disagreements over Azerbaijani demands for Armenia to change its constitution and the United States now apparently pushing its own vision for unblocking trade and communication in the region. Nonetheless, Blinken again emphasised that the two were close to reaching a deal. The foreign ministers issued identical scant three-paragraph statements which at least referred to a “historic agreement.”

Meanwhile, Moscow expressed its displeasure at both foreign ministers being invited to the event, which also marked the 75th anniversary of the military alliance in existence to counter the former Soviet Union at first and now the Russian Federation.     

For Armenia, as it seeks to diversify its economic, energy, and security needs away from its former sponsor, such a posture is now welcomed as it seeks external support to balance itself against Azerbaijan. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is now also reliant on Western support as he seeks to reverse his declining ratings. He has also found it useful to make Russia a scapegoat for his own security failings that saw the collapse of previous negotiations prior to September 2020 when war broke out instead. The same is true for the exodus of just over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Karabakh last year. For Azerbaijan, however, the situation is more complex. Baku is cautious about being drawn into geopolitical confrontations, especially given its shared border with the Russian Federation.

 

As a result, Baku has to be more flexible in its geopolitical manoeuvring while Yerevan has significantly less options in comparison.

 

Nonetheless, for the United States and European Union, any successful diversification by Armenia means normalisation with Azerbaijan and Türkiye. The country is landlocked and needs access to both Europe and later Central Asia. This therefore concerns Iran, one of its two trade routes operating given closed borders with its other neighbours. Only last week the Iranian State Media reported that if normalisation occurs then efforts must be made to increase the amount of gas supplied to Armenia when a barter agreement for electricity in return expires in 2030. Otherwise, Azerbaijan and Türkiye will take the initiative if the United States has its way.

 

[…]

 

On July 18th, both Aliyev and Pashinyan could attend the next European Political Community (EPC) summit at Blenheim Palace in the United Kingdom. It is worth noting, however, that Azerbaijan withdrew from the last EPC in Granada. Whether that happens again next week will be particularly revealing given that Hungary, a country considered the closest to Azerbaijan and Russia in the European Union, will host the following EPC on 7 November. This means that the EPC in Budapest will occur not only two days after the U.S. presidential elections on 5 November but also two days before the UN Climate Change Conference in Baku on 9 November. All three events could therefore prove pivotal. Hopes, though diminishing, were for some kind of agreement to be signed by COP-29.

The full opinion piece is available here. 

At the beginning of the month, the Armenian and Azerbaijani border demarcation commissions exchanged documents detailing the regulation of future activities. But this was not the unified document that had been expected. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had earlier that day refused to answer questions from the media as to whether the deadline set for such a document had been met or not. Even Radio Free Europe were unsure. While its Yerevan Bureau reported that the two sides hadn’t in fact managed to agree on the draft regulations, its Prague Headquarters at least reported progress.

As it turned out, the deadline had indeed been missed. “Something worked out, something didn’t work out,” one of Pashinyan’s MPs cryptically told the media three days later. “It’s okay, […] the deadline is not important.”

And maybe it wasn’t. Opposition protests led by a revanchist cleric had failed to disrupt the actual border delimitation and demarcation process on the Tavush-Gazakh section. Though Galstanyan recently toured the southernmost Siunik region of the country with a message of imminent disaster and an Azerbaijani and Turkish conspiracy to connect the two by force, something international commentators parroted consistently, that never really made any sense. On 10 June, US Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien visited Yerevan and highlighted how unblocking regional communications was a priority for everyone.

 

Yerevan should agree to the road and rail link between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan. By doing so, he argued, Armenia could better diversify its economic dependency away from Russia and evict Moscow from the South Caucasus. On 27 June, O’Brien delivered the same message in Baku while also underlying how Azerbaijan could use the connection to help Central Asia also diversify away from Russia. The objective would be to again bypass and even exclude both Beijing and Moscow from regional projects. Following the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Kazakhstan, that does not look likely.

 

It was always assumed that the US had geopolitical interests in facilitating an Armenia-Azerbaijan peace, just as Russia does. Now it was official. As a result, in recent days, some opposition commentators now no longer talk of a conspiracy to link Turkiye with Central Asia through a Zangezur Corridor, but what they sarcastically refer to as the Washington Corridor.

 

[…]

 

The first indication of whether that obstacle has been resolved will perhaps be if Bayramov and Mirzoyan do hold bilateral talks in the US next week. There is also the next European Political Summit (EPC) to be held in the United Kingdom on 18 July. Some are already speculating that Aliyev and Pashinyan could use the opportunity as they did prior to the ill-fated EPC in Granada last year. That ended multilateral talks and Armenia and Azerbaijan have since shifted to a bilateral format though at the expense of what little transparency did exist. There are clearly more questions than answers.

The full opinion piece is available here.