By Felix Light and Nailia Bagirova
TBILISI/BAKU (Reuters) – Armenia and Azerbaijan on Thursday accused each other of blocking a proposed UK-mediated meeting between their leaders, the latest bump in the road on an on-and-off peace process aimed at ending their more than three decade-long conflict.
Both Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev are in the United Kingdom for a summit of the European Political Community at Blenheim Palace, near Oxford.
Hikmet Hajiyev, foreign policy adviser to President Aliyev, told Reuters that Armenia had rejected a proposal for the two leaders to attend a meeting to be mediated by the British.
He said: “We regard Pashinyan’s refusal to meet in London as its intention to retreat from the peace agenda.”
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement shortly afterwards that Yerevan had offered Azerbaijan a bilateral meeting in the UK, but that Baku had declined the invitation. It said that the offer of a meeting still stood.
Pashinyan and Aliyev most recently met in Berlin in February, in a meeting mediated by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have repeatedly said they want to sign a peace treaty to end the conflict over the former breakaway Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian inhabitants enjoyed de facto independence from Baku for more than three decades until September 2023, when a lightning Azerbaijani offensive retook the territory and prompted around 100,000 Armenians to flee.
The two sides have since then pursued peace talks aimed at demarcating their 1000 km (625 mile) shared border, which remains closed and heavily militarised.
In May, Armenia returned four deserted Azerbaijani villages it had controlled since the early 1990s to Baku. The fate of several more villages, located in small enclaves of land surrounded by the other side’s territory, remains at stake.
Azerbaijan, which has several times the population of its longtime rival, also demands Armenia change its constitution to remove an indirect reference to Karabakh independence as part of the peace process.
(Reporting by Felix Light in Tbilisi and Nailia Bagirova in Baku; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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