A statement issued by the Armenian Foreign Ministry said that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev instructed their foreign ministers to “start preparations for peace negotiations between the two countries”, during a meeting held Wednesday in Brussels with the mediation of the European Union.
He added that “an agreement was reached during the meeting to form a bilateral committee on border demarcation issues.”
The statement indicated that this committee will be charged with ensuring security and stability along the border, according to “AFP”.
The Brussels meeting follows a new rise in the level of tension in Nagorno-Karabakh, where Russian peacekeeping forces have been deployed since November 2020.
In November 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement, ending a six-week war between the two former Soviet republics for control of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The conflict left more than 6,500 people dead, and ended with a severe defeat for Armenia, which was forced to cede to Azerbaijan large swathes of territory it had controlled since the 1990s.
The mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited mainly by Armenians, declared its separation from Azerbaijan following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which led to the outbreak of the first war in the nineties that killed 30,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
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