The President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has said that the border delimitation between Armenia and Azerbaijan must take place according to Baku's conditions.
Speaking in Lachin on Sunday (28 May) at an event to mark the return of internally displaced persons to the city some two and a half years after the end of the Second Karabakh War, President Aliyev said "the delimitation should be conducted on our conditions", arguing that they were "fair".
"The peace treaty should be based on international conditions, our road to Nakhchivan should be opened, and representatives of the Armenian army still rooted in Karabakh should be removed from there. These are our conditions," Aliyev stated.
Pashinyan calls on troop withdrawals to allow for border delimitation
On the topic of border delimitation, at a press conference last week on Monday (22 May), Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan repeated the Armenian position that both sides should withdraw their troops from the Armenia-Azerbaijan border as shown by the maps of the USSR General Staff of 1975. This would allow for border delimitation work to commence, according to Pashinyan.
"Also, I want to emphasise that the simultaneous withdrawal of troops does not in itself predetermine the border delimitation work. That is a separate process, this is just about ensuring the stability of the border situation. However, we also believe that the 1975 map can and should be the basis for further border delimitation work, too, because it implies the agreements reached in Prague on 6 October 2022, regarding carrying out border delimitation based on the Alma Ata declaration [of 1991]," said Pashinyan.