Pashinyan, Aliyev Meet in Kazan at BRICS Summit

The issue of opening the railway was being actively discussed by the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2021-22 during negotiations mediated by Charles Michel, president of the European Council. An agreement was even announced at that time stating that border and customs control should operate on the principle of reciprocity.

The Armenian government even made preliminary calculations estimating that the construction of the railway would cost $200 million. However, the Armenian side expected agreements to be documented before construction began, which did not happen.

During this period, Baku continued to promote the so-called Zangezur Corridor agenda, with Yerevan insisting that any extraterritorial logic behind the road through its southern Syunik region would be a red line for it.

Despite reported discussions on restored cargo transportation, Aghazaryan cautioned that it was too early to talk about Azerbaijan abandoning its agenda of securing a corridor through Armenia to its western Nakhichevan exclave, which Armenia would not control.

“Their goal is ‘Western Azerbaijan,’ and we are fighting to thwart such goals,” Aghazaryan emphasized, referring to repeated statements made in Baku at different levels about “historical Azerbaijani lands” in modern-day Armenia.

The source also told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that during their talks in Kazan, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan reached no specific agreement on the possible conclusion of a peace treaty.

The United States and other international partners of Armenia and Azerbaijan have repeatedly expressed their support for a peace treaty between the two South Caucasus nations, encouraging them to finalize it already this year.

Border Deal Framework

The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan have validated a framework agreement on the delimitation of the long border between the two countries.

The agreement which had been signed on August 30 involves “regulations” for joint activities of Armenian and Azerbaijani government commissions dealing with the delimitation process. It does not specify which maps or other legal documents will be used for that purpose.

The regulations say that the process will be based, unless agreed otherwise, on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration in which newly independent ex-Soviet republics recognized each other’s Soviet-era borders. Earlier this month, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry downplayed the legal significance of that declaration, saying that it “has nothing to do with the question of where the borders of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member states lie and which territories belong to which country.”

The Armenian parliament controlled by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s party ratified the regulations on October 23 amid strong opposition criticism. Opposition lawmakers pointed to the lack of specifics in them, saying that it could only help Azerbaijan clinch more territorial concessions from Armenia and hold on to Armenian border areas seized in the early 1990s as well as in 2022-2021.

President Vahagn Khachaturian signed the ratification bill into law late on October 24. The office of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced on October 25 that he too has formally approved the border deal.

The announcement came the day after Aliyev and Pashinyan met on the sidelines of a BRICS summit held in the Russian city of Kazan. The official readouts of the talks said they discussed ongoing efforts to negotiate an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty as well as delimit the border.

The Kazan talks were attended by deputy prime ministers of the two nations who signed the August 30 deal more than four months after Pashinyan controversially agreed to cede four disputed border areas to Azerbaijan. The unilateral land transfer sparked massive anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan in May and June. Pashinyan claimed in March that Azerbaijan will attack Armenia unless it regains control of those areas.