Pashinian, Aliyev to meet again in Moscow

PanARMENIAN.Net - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian announced on Thursday, May 18 that he and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will meet in Moscow on May 25 for fresh talks that will be hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We received an offer from the Russian president to hold a tripartite meeting in Moscow mediated by the Russian president and we accepted that offer,” he said during a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan, according to RFE/RL's Armenian Service.

The announcement was not immediately confirmed by the Kremlin or Aliyev’s office.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is scheduled to host talks between his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts in Moscow on Friday. The latter held U.S.-mediated marathon negotiations outside Washington earlier this month.

Pashinian did not comment on the agenda of what will be his second encounter with Aliyev in less than two weeks.

The Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders appear to have made progress towards a bilateral peace treaty on Sunday during four-hour negotiations in Brussels mediated by Charles Michel, the top European Union official. They pledged to meet again on June 1 on the sidelines of an EU-led summit in Moldova. They are due to be joined by Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Russia has been very critical of the U.S. and EU peace efforts which have intensified lately. It has repeatedly accused the Western powers of trying to use the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to drive Russia out of the South Caucasus. U.S. and EU officials have denied that.

Moscow maintains that Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements brokered by Putin are the only viable blueprint for settling the conflict.