Protracted dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan dates back to the late 1980s
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, reviving efforts to reach a final peace agreement after decades of conflict rooted in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, held in Abu Dhabi, comes four months after both sides agreed on a draft peace deal in March. While the draft raised hopes of ending one of the post-Soviet world’s most enduring conflicts, a final timeline for signing the accord remains unclear.
Both governments confirmed the high-level talks, which follow a period of tense calm along the countries’ 1,000km-long shared border, where a spike in ceasefire violations was recorded shortly after the draft’s announcement.
A significant stumbling block remains Azerbaijan’s insistence that Armenia amend its constitution, which Baku claims contains implicit territorial claims on Azerbaijani land. Although Yerevan denies this, Prime Minister Pashinyan has recently signalled support for updating the country’s founding charter, repeating the stance earlier this week.
The issue of regional connectivity also features in the negotiations. Azerbaijan has renewed its longstanding demand for an overland transport corridor through southern Armenia, linking mainland Azerbaijan with the Nakhchivan exclave — a region that borders Turkiye, Baku’s close ally. The so-called “Zangezur corridor” remains a point of contention, with Armenia raising sovereignty concerns.
Thursday’s meeting is the first between the two leaders since May, when they met on the sidelines of the European Political Community summit in Tirana, Albania.
Efforts to normalise relations in the wider region have also seen increased diplomatic engagement. In June, Prime Minister Pashinyan made a rare visit to Istanbul, where he held talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Armenian officials hailed the meeting as a “historic” step toward regional stability.
The protracted dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan dates back to the late 1980s, when war broke out over the Nagorno-Karabakh region — then an ethnic Armenian-majority enclave within Azerbaijan. The conflict led to two full-scale wars and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, including Muslim Azeris from Armenia and Christian Armenians from Azerbaijan.
Although Azerbaijan regained control over much of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive in 2020, followed by a brief operation in 2023 that brought the remaining separatist territory under its authority, tensions have continued to simmer.
This week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed optimism about the prospects for peace, calling for a swift conclusion to the talks and commending the UAE for facilitating the latest round of dialogue.