Will a peace agreement be signed with Armenia this year? Commentary from Baku
Azerbaijan-Armenia peace agreement
There are only five months left in 2024, but officials from Azerbaijan and Armenia express hopes in their statements for signing a peace agreement between the two countries before the New Year.
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Is it possible? The Azerbaijani editorial office of JAMnews posed this question to political commentator Haji Namazov.
“I do not expect a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia to be signed this year. This is quite problematic for several reasons.
First, president Ilham Aliyev named two conditions that must be met before it can be signed.
What are the conditions and the prospects of their fulfillment?
- Armenia, along with Azerbaijan, sends a request to the OSCE for the dissolution of the Minsk Group. Armenia has yet to officially respond to this proposal.
At the expert level, the reaction is as expected. Armenian political analysts find this unacceptable because, in their view, the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group would erase the entire history of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Political commentators in Armenia argue that such a step would prevent the issue from being revisited in the future.
In other words, in Armenia, at least within the expert community, no one is losing hope for a “revanche.”
Azerbaijan’s desire to eliminate the OSCE Minsk Group is quite logical. This structure, created to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, has achieved no tangible results in 28 years. Objectively assessing the OSCE Minsk Group’s activities, it seems to have aimed to freeze the conflict without achieving anything through diplomatic means while simultaneously urging the parties not to resort to military methods of resolution.
Without going into too much detail, it is clear that Armenia is far from agreeing to “finally kill” the already dead Minsk Group. In any case, there has been no positive reaction to this proposal.
- Armenia must amend the preamble of its constitution, which references the Act of Independence. It explicitly states the desire to annex Karabakh to Armenia. In other words, this is an open claim to the territory of a neighboring state.
Unlike the first condition mentioned above, the situation with constitutional changes in Armenia does not look so bleak. Official Yerevan is not opposed to a new constitution, although it does not present this as an agreement to Baku’s condition.
However, there are two points. Firstly, according to information from Armenia, the new constitution will not be ready before 2026. Secondly, it is unclear whether the preamble referencing the Act of Independence will be amended.
Summarizing all this, it can be said with confidence that Azerbaijan’s conditions for signing a peace treaty will not be met in 2024. At least, there are no indications of this today.
Secondly, the geopolitical situation in the world is currently quite unstable. Everyone is waiting for the results of the US presidential elections, which have become even more unpredictable after Biden’s withdrawal.
If the Democrats remain in power across the ocean, there will be no significant changes, and everything will continue as it is. But if Trump wins, which is the most likely outcome today, everything could turn upside down.
In the event of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and a ceasefire on that front, it is clear that Russia, freed from the burden of a heavy war, will turn its attention to its traditional zones of influence. The South Caucasus is among them. In this case, it remains only to guess what processes will unfold in our region.
But these are all assumptions, and no serious analyst would venture to make predictions about such developments.
One thing is clear: all this will happen closer to the end of 2024. Therefore, I wouldn’t expect a peace treaty to be signed by the end of the year.
We might see the signing of some kind of framework document that envisions signing the main treaty in the future, after all conditions are met. But even this is unlikely, considering that Azerbaijan does not trust Western platforms that aim to bring the parties to some kind of agreement.”
