Hikmat Hajiyev: Armenia recognized Azerbaijan's sovereignty over Karabakh with Prague, Sochi documents

"Despite the 30-year occupation, ethnic cleansing and massive destruction committed by Armenia on the territory of Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev, shortly after the 44-day Patriotic War, showed goodwill and came up with a peace agenda based on the mutual recognition of each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty," Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan - Head of the Foreign Policy Department of the Presidential Administration Hikmat Hajiyev said in an interview with Report.

"President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly stressed that negotiations on a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan and contacts with Armenian citizens living in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan are two completely separate issues.

In 2022, Azerbaijan sent the well-known 5 principles to Armenia that would form the basis of a peace agreement, the core of which is the mutual recognition of territorial integrity and sovereignty. At meetings in Prague and Sochi in October 2022, Azerbaijan and Armenia declared that they mutually recognize each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty on the base of the 1991 Almaty Declaration.

With the Almaty Declaration, the newly independent states recognized the administrative borders of the former Soviet republics as in the times of the USSR. Thus, with the Prague and Sochi documents, Armenia recognized the sovereignty of Azerbaijan over Karabakh," Hikmat Hajiyev said.