Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan gave an interview to Armenpress news agency presented below.
Question: Azerbaijan stated that the Armenian side has refused to participate in a trilateral meeting in Brussels. How would you comment on that?
Answer: During the quadrilateral meeting held in Prague, an agreement has been reached regarding the next meeting. We continue to adhere to this agreement and again express our readiness to arrange a meeting of the Prime Minister of Armenia, the President of Azerbaijan, the President of France and the President of the European Council within an acceptable time frame.
We believe that the meeting held in Prague in this format was quite effective and important in the context of the process of normalisation of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Armenian side, as before, is interested in the normalisation of relations.
Question: Baku is once again raising the thesis about the delimitation process based on historical maps. What is the position of Yerevan in this regard?
Answer: Such statements violate the commitment undertaken in Prague and Sochi to carry out delimitation between the two countries based on the UN Charter and the Alma-Ata Declaration.
Under this commitment, delimitation should be carried out on the basis of the legal acts that existed at the time of the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and had legal force and significance, moreover, on the basis of the official documents of the bodies authorised to carry out mapping, draw up maps and publish them as of the same date. Accordingly, the discussion about historical maps is at least incomprehensible, both in terms of definition and content.
It should also be emphasised that the general rhetoric on historical maps is dangerous for the independence of our countries, because if we focus on historical maps, it may turn out that the current territories of both the Republic of Armenia and even more so the Republic of Azerbaijan have been the territories of other countries for centuries.
In this context, I would like to draw attention to one more point: although following the meetings both in Sochi on November 26, 2021, and Brussels on April 6, 2022, it was agreed that the establishment of the commissions is primarily aimed at border security. Following the establishment of respective commissions, in September 2022, a new aggression was unleashed against the Republic of Armenia and new territories were occupied by Azerbaijan, which challenges not only the agreements reached and Baku's commitment to respect international law, but also its intentions towards the work of these commissions in general.
