President Aliyev Rejects Armenia’s Unusual Peace Proposal, Calls It Unrealistic

President Ilham Aliyev rejected Armenia’s latest unusual peace proposal, calling it unrealistic and emphasizing that all provisions of a potential peace treaty between the two nations must be agreed upon collectively.

During a recent meeting with the newly appointed Belgian ambassador in Baku, President Aliyev expressed his disapproval of Armenia’s suggestion to sign a peace treaty featuring only the agreed terms and leave unresolved issues for future negotiations.

President Aliyev referred to the "Madrid process and principles" that guided the negotiations during Armenian occupation of Azerbaijani territories, noting that a key provision was that "nothing would be agreed upon until all matters were resolved." Azerbaijan sticks to this principle, which was supported by the then-OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs.

However, the President expressed disappointment that some former Minsk Group members shifted their positions to back Armenia’s current proposals, which he believes are unrealistic. He accused Armenia of making these suggestions to portray a pacemaker image although Yerevan was aware that these suggestions were unacceptable.

President Aliyev noted that now, after two years of talks, patience and realism are required to achieve lasting peace in the South Caucasus, recalling the unproductive talks to solve the former Karabakh conflict for 28 years of occupation from 1992 to 2020.

In September, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that his country had presented its proposal to Baku, noting that the final version of the peace treaty consisted of 17 articles, of which 13, including the preamble, had been agreed. He explained that most of the wording in the articles had already been settled and proposed signing and ratifying the peace treaty based on the agreed-upon articles while continuing negotiations on the remaining unresolved issues.

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 the 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.

However, finalization of the peace treaty remains stalled despite the significant progress in peace negotiations, including the delimitation and demarcation of 12.7 kilometers of their shared border and the return of four Azerbaijani villages that had been occupied by Armenia since the 1990s.

Baku has been insisting on the removal of a Constitutional provision about the unification of Azerbaijan's Karabakh region with Armenia, calling it a territorial claim against Azerbaijan.

In August, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov reiterated the urgent need for ending Armenia’s Constitutional territorial claims against Azerbaijan, and, thus, remove the barrier to the finalization of a peace agreement. Furthermore, President Aliyev stated that as long as Armenia’s Constitution contains territorial claims on the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, a peace agreement would not be possible.