BERLIN: Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed to continue peace negotiations after a new effort in Berlin this week to resolve their decades-long conflict, the German foreign ministry on Friday said.
Armenia’s Ararat Mirzoyan and Azerbaijan’s Jeyhun Bayramov held two days of intense discussions in Berlin hosted by Foreign Minister of Germany Annalena Baerbock, who lauded their brave steps towards a peace agreement.
A German foreign ministry spokeswoman said the two nations had a great interest in continuing to settle outstanding issues together and to meet for this purpose again.
The foreign ministries of Armenia and Azerbaijan in a statement on Thursday had also said that they desired to continue talks on the open issues.
The German spokeswoman hailed the agreement to pursue peace talks as a very good sign adding that the two sides wanted to work step by step towards a peace deal.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars, in the 1990s and in 2020, before forces of Azerbaijan last September recaptured the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh that ended three decades of Armenian rule over the region.
Tensions have remained high since the Azerbaijani military offensive that triggered the migration of most of the enclave’s ethnic-Armenian population of more than 100,000 people.
The talks in Berlin built on a surprise meeting between leaders of the two nations on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last month.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev under German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s mediation, agreed in Munich to push on with peace talks.
