French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has said that France is ready, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, to support negotiations between Yerevan and Baku aimed at a peace deal.
In separate telephone conversations this week with Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Ceyhun Bayramov, Le Drian highlighted the importance of stability and peace in the South Caucasus, according to the French Foreign Ministry.
In recent months the two countries have engaged in border clashes that resulted in the deaths of both Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers.
The violence, coming after the two countries fought a bloody six-week war in 2020 over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, renewed international calls for the two neighbors to engage in a process of demarcating their Soviet-era border.
The 2020 war resulted in Baku gaining control of parts of Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as seven adjacent districts that had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since the end of a separatist war in 1994. Some 2,000 Russian troops were deployed to monitor the cease-fire.
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said on March 14 that it had applied to the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs (France, the United States, and Russia) to organize Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations on a peace treaty “on the basis of the UN Charter, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Helsinki Final Act.”
The announcement followed a statement by Azerbaijan’s Bayramov that Baku had submitted a five-point proposal to Yerevan to normalize relations.
In his conversations with the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers, Le Drian also reportedly expressed concern about the recent tensions on the ground and called for all possible measures to be taken to reduce them.
The top French diplomat, in particular, stressed the importance of contacts between the sides on the issue of restoring gas supplies to Nagorno-Karabakh, which were disrupted earlier this month due to a damaged pipeline passing through Baku-controlled territory.
Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian leadership on March 19 said that gas supplies to the region had been partially restored after the completion of maintenance work on the pipeline.
They had earlier accused Baku of not allowing Armenian maintenance workers to enter the territory controlled by Azerbaijan for repairs, as a result of which the region was deprived of gas supplies for 11 days amid freezing temperatures.
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