Washington – AFP
On Monday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken offered to help his country build ties between Armenia and Azerbaijan. And two years have passed since the war between them.
After separate calls with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Blinken said the two countries “have a historic opportunity to achieve peace in the region.” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Blinken offered U.S. assistance to facilitate regional communications and transportation links between the two countries.
Price said the United States is ready to engage with “like-minded partners” to support peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Aliyev and Pashinyan met with EU brokers last May to discuss a future peace deal, and their foreign ministers continued talks in Georgia this month. In 2020, Russia brokered a ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended a six-week war that killed more than 6,500 people.
Russia has deployed about 2,000 peacekeepers and Armenia has agreed to cede large swaths of territory it has held for decades. During the first war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s, the United States, Russia and France, which included strong Armenian communities, formed the so-called “Minsk Group”; It is a compromise on Nagorno-Karabakh, an internationally recognized Armenian-populated region as part of Azerbaijan.