Biden Asks Azerbaijan to Finalize Peace with Armenia; Aliyev Views Draft Treaty as Incomplete

US President Joseph Biden sent a letter to his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev highlighting the importance of concluding a peace deal with Armenia.

Pledging Washington’s firm support, President Biden said a peace agreement would not only ensure Azerbaijan's sovereignty and territorial integrity, but it would also transform the entire region by paving the way for increased trade, investment, and connectivity between Europe and Central Asia.

“As the world's attention turns to Baku for COP29, you have a unique opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to peace in front of a global audience. As you know, finalizing the remaining articles of the peace agreement will require creativity and compromise on all sides. But I am confident that you will continue to meet this moment, and I encourage you to finalize an agreement this year,” the letter read, referring to the latest version of the treaty.

The latest version of the peace treaty consisted of 17 articles, of which 13, including the preamble, had been agreed.

In September, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan proposed signing and ratifying the peace treaty based on the agreed-upon articles while continuing negotiations on the remaining unresolved issues.

However, Azerbaijan views Armenia’s proposal to sign the peace agreement in its current incomplete state as both unrealistic and unacceptable, according to Elchin Amirbayov, Special Representative of President of Azerbaijan.

In an interview with Berliner Zeitung, Amirbayov responded to recent remarks by an Armenian ambassador that Armenia is ready to sign a peace deal with Azerbaijan as soon as tomorrow. Amirbayov expressed serious doubts regarding the sincerity of this claim.

"Suggesting that a peace agreement in its current incomplete form could be signed tomorrow is clearly unrealistic, unacceptable, and deliberately misleading. There are still very important issues in the draft peace agreement that must be fully addressed. Otherwise, the agreement would be half-baked and deficient," Amirbayov said.

He emphasized that the most significant obstacle to the peace deal is territorial claim in Armenia’s Constitution on the Karabakh region, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.

"Ignoring this problem would amount to ignore the elephant in the room," he said.

Amirbayov believes that the peace agreement will not be possible without constitutional amendments in Armenia as territorial claim in its current constitution can encourage a new government in the future to annul the document by citing constitutional contradictions, as Armenia’s constitution supersedes any external agreement.

Armenia’s Constitution references its Declaration of Independence, which includes territorial claims against Azerbaijan by endorsing the unification of Azerbaijan’s Karabakh (Garabagh) region with Armenia. The preamble of the Declaration states, “Based on the December 1, 1989, joint decision of the Armenian SSR Supreme Council and the Artsakh National Council on the ‘Reunification of the Armenian SSR and the Mountainous Region of Karabakh’.” This means that the notorious “miatsum” (reunion) campaign of the 1990s is still alive and the annexation of the Karabakh region, an internationally recognized part of Azerbaijan (referred to as Artsakh in Armenian), is officially part of Armenia’s state policy.

Although Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan acknowledged that a peace treaty with Azerbaijan was close to completion, Yerevan has been denouncing Azerbaijan’s demand for a constitutional change as unacceptable.

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly stated that the territorial claims embedded in Armenia’s Constitution contradict the nature of a peace agreement. Amirbayov reiterated the official position of Azerbaijan saying, “we can’t be satisfied with any peace agreement, and we won’t sign something just to please the outside world."

Armenia and Azerbaijan had long been at odds over the latter’s Karabakh (Garabagh) region. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Armenia launched a full-scale war against Azerbaijan, which ended in a ceasefire in 1994. The war led to Armenia occupying 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territories, resulting in over 30,000 Azerbaijanis killed and one million others expelled from those lands in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Armenia.

On September 27, 2020, the decades-old conflict reignited after Armenia’s forces illegally deployed in occupied Azerbaijani lands shelled military positions and civilian settlements of Azerbaijan. During the ensuing counter-attack operations that lasted 44 days, Azerbaijani forces liberated over 300 settlements, including the cities of Jabrayil, Fuzuli, Zangilan, Gubadli, and Shusha, from Armenian occupation. The war ended on November 10, 2020, with a tripartite statement signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia, under which Armenia returned the occupied Aghdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin districts to Azerbaijan.

Shortly after the 2020 war, Azerbaijani authorities expressed their readiness and determination to negotiate with Armenia to bring long-awaited peace to the region. In March 2022, Baku proposed five basic principles to Yerevan, including mutual recognition of territorial integrity and border delimitation.

Bigger chances have surfaced to finally normalize the mutual ties in a durable peace after Azerbaijan’s one-day anti-terror operation in September 2023 that restored the country's sovereignty in the entire territory of the Karabakh region. On September 20, the illegal Armenian separatist regime in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan agreed to full disarmament and withdrawal. On September 28, the separatist regime in the region announced its self-dissolution.