The year 2024 is lost: Instead of a peace deal, Armenia has a set of ultimatums

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev gave a long interview to VGTRK and RIA Novosti, a significant part of which was devoted to Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, Armenia in general, as well as the negotiation process between the states on the potential signing of a “peace agreement”.

The main theses on Armenia are as follows:

• About “300 thousand Azerbaijanis” who “left Armenia” at the end of the last century are awaiting Yerevan’s response regarding “their return and reintegration”;
• Armenia must change its Constitution to achieve final reconciliation with Azerbaijan;
• To sign the “peace agreement”, Armenia must agree to the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group;
• “Official Yerevan will not withstand an arms race with Azerbaijan”, which, in turn, is allegedly “forced to increase its military budget for 2025 in response to Armenia’s actions and bring it to a record $5 billion”;
• Armenia should understand that the United States and France will not help it “on the ground”;
• “Azerbaijan is urging and will continue to urge the Armenian sponsors, the Soros’s supporters in Washington, to stop the rearmament of the Armenian army”;
• Armenia is waiting for the go-ahead from Washington to finally quit the CSTO;
• One of the articles of the “peace agreement”, which has not yet been agreed upon, concerns refraining from international lawsuits against each other, and the other concerns the non-deployment of representatives of other countries on the border with Azerbaijan.

Firstly, Aliyev’s speech confirmed the thesis that we voiced last week that, in fact, it is not two articles of the deal but a whole “bunch of problems” that Yerevan and Baku cannot agree on. More specifically, a whole set of demands regarding Yerevan continues to be on the Azerbaijani agenda: from the “Zangezur corridor” to Armenia’s demilitarization.

Secondly, Aliyev continues to dissemble and tries to “sell” to the military and political leadership of Russia such theses that are resonating in Moscow today. That is why he makes statements about Soros, about the “go-ahead from the State Department” to quit the CSTO, and about the fact that “France and the United States will not help Armenia.” At the same time, he is “skillfully silent” about Baku’s strategic cooperation with the United Kingdom, the United States (which oversees the armament of the Azerbaijani army for the future war against Iran), and France. He is silent about the purchase of weapons from EU member states and silent about the transformation of Azerbaijan into a full-fledged proxy of Turkey.

Yes, perhaps Azerbaijan does not need a separate Turkish military base, but not because Aliyev is “fighting for sovereignty”, but because Azerbaijan has long ago completely turned into one large military base for Turkey and even for Israel.

However, what really matters from Aliyev’s interview is that Armenia has lost another post-war year. We are no closer to the agreement than we were at the beginning of 2024. The threats to Armenia have not been reduced. And it turned out that the meaning of Nikol Pashinyan’s stay in power in 2024 was simply to provide him with state protection and the opportunity to use state resources to ensure his personal high level of welfare.

Think about it…