Azerbaijan and Armenia are due on Wednesday to resume peace talks in Berlin that are being closely watched by regional powers Turkey, Iran and Russia.
The planned meeting between Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and his Armenian counterpart, Ararat Mirzoyan, comes on the heels of heightened tensions between the two former Soviet states, which saw four Armenian soldiers killed on Feb. 13 in the southeastern Syunik province that borders Azerbaijan.
There is mounting speculation that a deal may finally be reached to establish diplomatic relations, but that it will leave many outstanding issues — notably Azerbaijan’s demands for a land corridor connecting it through Armenian territory to Turkey — unresolved. “If an agreement is struck, it will likely be rather broad and vague, signaling intent rather than containing real substance,” Olesya Vartanyan, Crisis Group's senior analyst for the South Caucasus region, told Al-Monitor. “For Pashinyan, it’s about buying time — to ensure, at this point, the very survival of Armenia proper."
With Turkey’s backing, Azerbaijan won a 44-day-long war in 2020 over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that was majority Armenian until its nearly entire population of 120,000 was effectively chased out by Azerbaijan in September 2023. Pashinyan has since doubled down on preventing yet another Azerbaijani onslaught, which lies at the heart of his strategy of wooing the West and Turkey, but with little to show for his efforts so far.
