France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz held talks Thursday with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, during a European summit in Spain.
EU officials had hoped the talks would include Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in what would have been his first face-to-face meeting with Pashinyan since Baku seized the contested enclave in a lightning offensive last month, sparking a huge exodus of Armenian refugees.
But Aliyev refused to attend the planned talks at the European Political Community (EPC) summit in the southern city of Granada, which were to be mediated by European Council President Charles Michel.
Azerbaijan has been angered by what officials say is French and German bias towards the Armenian position.
The talks began at 3:30 pm (13:30 GMT), the French president’s office said.
The five leaders last met in Moldova in June during the last gathering of the EPC, a loose grouping of European states inside and outside the EU and NATO. At the time, tensions were already high between the two South Caucasus leaders.
Azerbaijan rejected the format of the latest talks because it wanted its ally Turkey to be included as a mediator.
But Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was not invited to the meeting, and did not turn up for the broader Granada summit in another blow to European hopes of playing mediator.
On arrival in Granada, Pashinyan expressed regret that he wouldn’t meet Aliyev for the chance of signing a “turning point document”.
Several hours into the summit, Baku said Azerbaijan was ready to take part in EU-mediated talks with Armenia despite what it called France’s policy of “militarisation” in the South Caucasus.
AFP