\n<\/p>\n
Draft deal to end bitter decades-long conflict agreed 4 months ago, but timeline for sealing it remains uncertain.<\/em><\/p>\n The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan are holding peace talks in the United Arab Emirates after nearly four decades of conflict.<\/p>\n The meeting in Abu Dhabi on Thursday between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, confirmed by both their governments, comes after the two countries finalised a draft peace deal in March.<\/p>\n The South Caucasus countries have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.<\/p>\n Peace talks began after Azerbaijan recaptured Karabakh in a lightning offensive in September 2023, prompting a huge exodus of almost all of the territory\u2019s 100,000 Armenians, who fled to Armenia.<\/p>\n But the timeline for sealing a deal remains uncertain.<\/p>\n Ceasefire violations along the heavily militarised 1,000km (620-mile) shared border surged soon after the draft deal was announced, though there have been no reported violations recently.<\/p>\n In a potential stumbling block to a deal, Azerbaijan has said it wants Armenia to change its constitution, which it says makes implicit claims to Azerbaijani territory.<\/p>\n Yerevan denies this, but Pashinyan has repeatedly stressed in recent months \u2013 most recently this week \u2013 that the South Caucasus country\u2019s founding charter needs to be updated.<\/p>\n Azerbaijan also asked for a transport corridor through Armenia, linking the bulk of its territory to Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani enclave that borders Baku\u2019s ally, Turkiye.<\/p>\n Pashinyan and Aliyev\u2019s last encounter was in May, on the sidelines of the European Political Community summit in Tirana, Albania.<\/p>\n In June, Pashinyan made a rare visit to Istanbul to hold talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a meeting Armenia described as a \u201chistoric\u201d step towards regional peace.<\/p>\n This week, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed hope for a swift peace deal between the Caucasus neighbours.<\/p>\n The outbreak of hostilities between the two countries in the late 1980s prompted mass expulsions of hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim Azeris from Armenia, and Armenians, who are majority Christian, from Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Draft deal to end bitter decades-long conflict agreed 4 months ago, but timeline for sealing it remains uncertain. The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan are holding peace talks in the United Arab Emirates after nearly four decades of conflict. The meeting in Abu Dhabi on Thursday between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[3396,3397,267,807,529,150,2523,1456,3398],"class_list":{"0":"post-10432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-armenia","9":"tag-azerbaijan","10":"tag-conflict","11":"tag-leaders","12":"tag-meet","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-peace","15":"tag-talks","16":"tag-uae"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}