YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Armenia should change its constitution, agree to the dissolution of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group on Nagorno-Karabakh and open a land corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said over the weekend.
“We expect Armenia to fulfill its commitments in this regard,” Bayramov said, referring to the extraterritorial corridor sought by Baku.
Azerbaijani leaders regularly accuse Yerevan of not complying with a relevant provision of a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement that stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The clause commits Armenia to opening rail and road links between Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan.
The Armenian government insists that it does not stipulate that people and cargo transported to and from Nakhichevan must be exempt from Armenian border checks. It says that Baku has ignored its unpublished compromise proposals on the issue made in recent months.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev implicitly threatened in January this year to open such a corridor by force. Baku raised more fears of such military action in March just days after the two sides essentially finalized a draft Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
Bayramov reiterated Baku’s preconditions for signing the treaty: a change of the Armenian constitution allegedly containing territorial claims to Azerbaijan and the dissolution of the Minsk Group that had long been co-headed by the United States, Russia and France.
