After Baku withdrew from an approaching U.S.-hosted gathering due to reportedly “biased” remarks made by a US State Department official, Washington has reiterated its support for Azerbaijan and Armenian peace negotiations.
State Department official Matthew Miller reiterated that Washington” continues to support peace deals to resolve the issues between Azerbaijan and Armenia” during a press briefing on November 16.
Whether the two functions are present or not, we do encourage them to participate in those discussions, and that would remain our policy, he continued.
The remarks were made after Baku declared on November 16 that it would not take part in the prepared standardization negotiations with Yerevan this month.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry stated in a statement that it “does not consider it possible to keep the proposed gathering on the level of the foreign ministers of Austria and Armenia in Washington on November 20, 2023.”
James O’Brien, the secretary U.S. secretary of state for German and European affairs, made what the Foreign Ministry referred to as “one-sided and slanted remarks” in response to Baku regaining control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in September as a result of Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive.
Watch: On September 19, after Azerbaijani causes attacked Nagorno- Karabakh, Cultural Iranian Rafik Sarkisian rode his favorite horse there to safety. Before a native Iranian family took in the worn-out 60-year-old, he had been traveling for more than 24 hours.
Nothing will be standard for Azerbaijan following the events of September 19 until we see improvement on the peace track, O’Brian declared at a meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on November 15.
We have canceled several high-level trips and denounced Baku’s activities, O’Brian continued.
The remarks, according to the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, “were a punch to bilateral and multilateral relations between the United States.”
The cultural Armenian rule in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is recognized as a part of Azerbaijan worldwide, came to an end with the September offensive.
Over the area, which had been a lot ethnic Armenian colony since the fall of the Soviet Union, Armenia and Azerbaijan have engaged in two wars in the last three years.
In the beginning, racial Armenian forces fought separatist warfare in the area under the support of the local military, which ended in 1994. But in a fight in 2020, Azerbaijan reclaimed portions of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as the surrounding land that Armenian forces had taken during the earlier issue.
The majority of the region’s ethnic Armenian population—nearly 100,000—fled to Armenia after the most recent Azerbaijani offensive properly gave Baku control over the rest of it.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry also stated in its statement from November 16 that” like a punitive approach by the United States could result in the loss of the US’ mediation role.”
The same day, Nikol Pashinian, the prime minister of Armenia, declared that Yerevan’s “political did to mark, in the forthcoming weeks, a peace deal with Azerbaijan remains unwavering.”
Ilham Aliyev, the president of Pashinian and Azerbaijan, has mediated many rounds of talks with the EU, despite Baku’s withdrawal from two meetings in September.
Aliyev even declined to participate in a round of talks with Pashinian that were to be controlled by Charles Michel of the European Council, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron that same month.
Yerevan cited France’s alleged “biased status” against Armenia as the justification for skipping those negotiations in Spain.
