The European Union will send a “political mission” to Armenia along the border with Azerbaijan to help “restore confidence” between the two countries and demarcate the border, parties participating in a quadripartite meeting involving France, Prague said on Thursday.

“The mission will start in October and its maximum duration will be two months. The purpose of this mission is to restore confidence and (…) assist the border demarcation commissions,” reads a joint press release following talks between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilam Aliyev, French President Emmanuel Macron and French President Emmanuel Macron. President of the European Council Charles Michel.

“Armenia has agreed to facilitate the deployment of (this) mission” and “Azerbaijan has agreed to cooperate with this mission in all respects,” the joint statement said.

The four men negotiated for hours, late into the night from Thursday to Friday, on the sidelines of the first meeting of the European Political Community in Prague.

“Armenia and Azerbaijan reaffirmed their commitment to the UN Charter and the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration, by which they mutually recognized their territorial integrity and national sovereignty,” the joint statement says.

They “confirmed” that this latter “will form the basis of the work of the border demarcation committees and that the next meeting of the committees will take place in Brussels before the end of October,” the text specifies.

With the agreements of what was then Alma-Ata (now known as Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) of the former Soviet republics was created, which included Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In September, fighting between the armed forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan killed at least 286 people. These were the bloodiest battles between the two Caucasian neighbors since the war they fought in 2020.

Their conflict concerns the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, as well as the demarcation of their borders.

Now that Moscow has been characterized as isolated on the international stage since its invasion of Ukraine in late February, the United States and the European Union have taken on the role of mediators in the process of de-escalating tensions and normalizing relations between Baku and Yerevan.

Source: RES-IPE