Armenia Rules out Border Demarcation Talks until Azerbaijani Forces Pull out of Armenian Territory

The fully declassified draft agreement, which was published later that same day, revealed none of the attributions made by Minasyan. Rather than an agreement to cede Armenian territory, the document commits Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia to form a border demarcation committee “in accordance with their respective national laws.” This committee would meet at the end of June at the earliest to discuss a framework for conducting future demarcation activities along the two countries’ border. The document provides no timeline as to when such activities will commence or end.

Despite the innocuous nature of the draft agreement, some have expressed concern that Armenia would not be on an equal bargaining position as the loser of the recent war against a vengeful Azerbaijan. Three soviet-era exclaves of Azerbaijan, which lie entirely within Armenian territory, in Tavush and Ararat mazes respectively, have been the center of particular attention given their proximity to two of Armenia’s major international highway connections. During Thursday’s parliamentary session, Security Council chairman Armen Grigoryan refuted the idea as being impractical. Indeed, none of those three exclaves, which have been under Armenian control since 1991, would be viable if handed to Azerbaijan. They are not accessible to mainland Azerbaijan which would make infrastructure projects and administrative tasks impossible. Grigoryan also reminded listeners that Azerbaijan also controls the Armenian exclave of Artsivashen which is larger than all three Azerbaijani exclaves combined, and holds strategic value due to its altitude.

During the same question period, Pashinyan also suggested that one likely outcome of the border demarcation is that the de facto frontier, which mostly follows a system of trenches across mountain tops built in during the First Karabakh War, might simply remain as is. A similar solution to the exclaves question had been part of the aborted 1996 peace treaty. “Azeri military positions remain on territory of the Republic of Armenia since the 1990s, similarity some Armenian trenches sit within the soviet-era boundaries of Azerbaijan,” Pashinyan said. Agreeing on an international border would be one way to solve this issue according to the prime minister, who suggested that negotiations may go on for years.

Currently, only Armenia’s borders with Turkey and Iran are fully demarcated as both coincide with the former Soviet Union’s international boundaries along the Arax river. A similar delimitation committee to the newly proposed one has yet to complete demarcation of the Armenian-Georgian border after almost thirty years of work.

While Pashinyan has deemed border demarcation to be a necessary process as part of the reintegration of regional trade routes, and thus providing easier access to new markets for Armenian goods, he has made it conditional on Azerbaijan respecting its commitments to the November 9 ceasefire agreement. “There’s a chance that we might not even sign [the document]” Pashinyan announced to Parliament, adding “Nothing will be signed until Azeri troops withdraw from Armenian territory.”

Responding to the crisis, Baku denied that its troops were even inside Armenian territory, claiming instead that the entirety of Sev Lake falls within its own borders. In an attempt to soften decades-worth of racist and denigrating comments towards Armenians, Azeri dictator Ilham Aliyev told the Russian state-owned TASS agency that “Azeri and Armenian peoples need to learn to live side-by-side again.”