Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed yesterday to the text of a peace treaty that would end their decades-long conflict stretching back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan has called for Armenia to remove what it characterized as implicit claims to Azerbaijani territory from its constitution, which would require a referendum, before the treaty can be signed. (The Guardian)
Our Take
The talks that resulted in this agreement technically began in 2020 as part of the Russia-brokered ceasefire ending the latest outbreak of hostilities between the two countries over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic-Armenian region that split off from Azerbaijan with Armenia’s backing in 1988. But the negotiations after that war stalled quickly, and it wasn’t until Azerbaijan fully retook Nagorno-Karabakh with a rapid military offensive in September 2023 that talks began in earnest.
The wars in 2020 and 2023 left Baku in control of all the Azerbaijani territory Armenia had held for decades, with the final lightning offensive also resulting in an exodus of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, in what many observers considered to be an ethnic cleansing.
