Former US envoy hopes peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia will be concluded very soon

International expert, board member of the Jamestown Foundation, and former US Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Matthew Bryza, thinks that the peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia seems within reach.

In a statement to Report, Bryza said that the peace treaty is likely to be concluded very soon.

However, the former US envoy thinks that there are still a lot of negotiations that need to take place to resolve those sorts of issues and border delimitation:

“With border demarcation, the question of which maps and which locations of ethnic populations at what point in history is always a very difficult issue to resolve. But the good news is that the peace treaty seems within reach and is likely to be concluded very soon.”

He emphasized that this situation is a very important point: “Because the peace treaty will resolve the conflict politically and end the war. When wars end, they end with political agreement after the military phase. That’s where we have come.”

“In all my years being involved in the Karabakh conflict, we never saw a peace treaty in the near term that was realistic. A peace treaty always seemed very far away. The Madrid principles and all those Minsk Group negotiations focused on a more modest goal, which was to agree on the basic principles of a future peace treaty that would have to be negotiated after the basic principles were agreed,” Bryza said.

“But now we are at a point where the peace treaty seems likely, and with the peace treaty and the place, I think it will be easier to resolve the technical, historical, and cultural issues that are always involved in defining the international border between two countries,” the expert concluded.