Aliyev and Pashinian spoke both in a one-on-one format and in the presence of other senior Armenian and Azerbaijani officials. They did not announce concrete agreements right after the talks that reportedly lasted for about five hours.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said they agreed to “continue bilateral negotiations and confidence-building measures between the two countries.” It said they also instructed relevant officials from their governments to build on “progress” made in the delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border
The Azerbaijani pro-government news agency APA reported, for its part, that the two leaders held “serious and meaningful discussions” on a bilateral peace treaty finalized in March, the border delimitation and Azerbaijan’s demands for a land corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave passing through Armenia. It said they agreed to “continue negotiations both at the level of working groups and at a higher political level.”
Baku makes the signing of the peace treaty conditional on a change of the Armenian constitution which it says contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan. A senior aide to Aliyev repeated this precondition in a newspaper interview published earlier this week.
The corridor issue is another sticking point. The Armenian Foreign Ministry did not mention it in its readout of the Abu Dhabi talks. Pashinian’s government has rejected, at least until now, any arrangement that would call into question full Armenian control over the transit routes for Nakhichevan.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed over the weekend that Yerevan is now more open to accepting Azerbaijani demands. Erdogan met with Pashinian in Istanbul on June 20.
The United States reportedly proposed in late May that Armenian border and customs checks for the transit of people and cargo to and from Nakhichevan be outsourced to an American company. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal could be reached “pretty soon.”