Nikol Pashinyan announced today, Monday, Armenia’s readiness to recognize him closed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh as part of neighboring Azerbaijan, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

However, the Prime Minister of Armenia set a condition for Baku to provide guarantees for the security of the ethnic Armenian population.

Last week’s meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev – the fifth meeting of its kind under European mediation – took place at the end of the week marked by new conflicts on the borders of the two countriesduring which Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers were killed.

On June 1, a new meeting between Mr. Pashinyan and Aliyev is scheduled in Moldova, in which, in addition to Charles Michel, on the sidelines of the second summit of the European Political Community.

Two states of the Caucasus are in conflict nearly three decades for control over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

Two former Soviet republics of the Caucasus they fought in two warsin 1990 and 2020, for control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region populated mostly by Armenians that broke away from Azerbaijan more than three decades ago.

After a short war in the fall of 2020, when Azerbaijan recaptured the territory, Baku and Yerevan signed an agreement mediated by Moscow. Since then, Russian soldiers have guaranteed peace in Nagorno-Karabakh, but Armenia has been complaining for months about the ineffectiveness of that mission.

Tensions escalated further when on April 23 Baku announced the installation of a checkpoint on the Lachin corridor, the only road connecting Armenia to the separatist enclave.

Source: Reuters.