Briefing - Armenia and Azerbaijan: Lasting peace in sight? - 27-10-2025
At no point in more than 30 years have Armenia and Azerbaijan been closer to achieving lasting peace, and yet the so far bumpy road to peace continues to appear vulnerable to domestic and external factors. On 8 August 2025, in Washington DC, the leaders of both countries signed a Joint Declaration committing to achieve peace and initialled a 17-article peace agreement, the product of months of closed-doors and exclusively bilateral negotiations between the two countries. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in conflict over Nagorno Karabakh since the end of the Cold War, in the longest-running conflict in the post-Soviet space. Two bloody war episodes, in the 1990s and in 2020, have alternated with periods of frozen conflict over three decades, leaving behind more than 30 000 casualties, over a million displaced people from both sides, and a long list of seemingly inextricable mutual grievances running deep in both countries' societies. Decades of international mediation, within the OSCE Minsk group, then in parallel strands under the aegis of Russia, the EU and the US, ended abruptly in September 2023, with Azerbaijan's lightning military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, leading within days to the dissolution of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) and to the forced exodus of some 100 000 ethnic Armenians. In the dangerous security vacuum created after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which altered the power balance in the region and discredited the role of Russia as security guarantor and peace broker, fears over a third war intensified. Against all odds, after months of exclusively bilateral negotiations, both parties announced in March 2025 that they had agreed on a draft peace treaty, establishing the basis for future peaceful mutual relations but leaving aside contentious issues, such as border delimitation and connectivity. However, the announcement came with Azerbaijan's precondition, ahead of the final signature, of removing from the preamble of the Armenian constitution a reference that Azerbaijan considered to be an implicit territorial claim. The seemingly impossible task for Armenia, where a constitutional change must be approved by popular referendum, appeared to put the peace process in limbo sine die. The 8 August Washington Summit gave a decisive new impetus to the process, although Azerbaijan maintains its precondition regarding what it sees as necessary changes to the Armenian constitution.
Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP
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