Armenia, Azerbaijan hold border delimitation talks

Yerevan announced that Armenia and Azerbaijan resumed talks on Thursday regarding the delimitation of their shared borders, at a time when peace negotiations between these two countries in the Caucasus are facing obstacles.

The spokesperson for the Armenian Committee, Ani Babayan, told Agence France-Presse that the Armenian and Azerbaijani committees involved in "border delimitation" have started the "fifth round of talks."

Babayan stated that these committees are headed, respectively, by the Armenian vice Prime Minister, Mher Grigoryan, and his Azerbaijani counterpart, Shahin Mustafayev.

A dispute has been ongoing between Baku and Yerevan for decades over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an Azerbaijani territory that Baku reclaimed in September after a sudden attack against Armenian separatists.

Almost all Armenian residents in the region, more than 100,000 people out of a registered 120,000, fled to Armenia since then.

Despite their leaders' announcement of the possibility of signing a comprehensive peace agreement by the end of the year, peace talks between the former Soviet republics have not made progress.

In mid-November, Azerbaijan refused to participate in talks with Armenia, scheduled to take place in the United States during the current month, due to Washington's "biased" stance following statements by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James O'Brien.

In October, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev declined to meet Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Spain due to recent European, especially French, initiatives in support of Armenia.

AFP