Will Azerbaijani, Armenian FMs meet on the sidelines of UN GA? Farhad Mammadov's discourse

Farhad Mammadov, the political analyst and director of the South Caucasus Research Centre, wondered on his Telegram channel whether a meeting of Azerbaijani and Armenian Foreign Ministers would be held on the sidelines of the UN GA.

"Both foreign ministers flew to New York to attend the UN General Assembly. It would be strange not to use this opportunity, as there are only 11 days left before the end of September.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov will also be at the UN GA (he was granted a visa after all), and State Department head Blinken has been active so far.

The confirmation of the meeting has, by and large, only been given by the Armenian Foreign Minister. There was no information from the Azerbaijani side with confirmation after the Armenian provocation on the notional border.

After Brussels, it was clear that negotiations on the text of the peace treaty would proceed on the basis of the five principles proposed by Baku. This was also hinted at by Pashinyan.

However, the Armenian position is notoriously volatile. Plus the activity of the US, which is still in the process of working out its position. Today, the US stance reflects the pre-war, outdated position of the co-chair of the defunct OSCE Minsk Group.

The US position still tries to give hope to the "status" issue. This is, one might say, the last frontier for Azerbaijan to completely remove the Karabakh issue from the inter-state agenda between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The results of the latest escalation have strengthened Azerbaijan's position in the American direction as well. "You want to help Pashinyan, convince him to sign a peace treaty!" This has been explained to him in Russian and French; now it is the turn of American English.

It could also be that dizzied by American efforts, the Armenian leadership will go for a resumption of the "status" issue, or else make a precondition for Azerbaijan to "vacate the positions it has taken". And this will lead to the collapse of the negotiations.

As a result of the unconstructive, to put it mildly, the position of Iravan, or rather its volatility, and its failure to comply with the agreements, the processes have become confused and lost their constructive potential. If Armenia now gets the support of its patrons to torpedo the normalisation process, Azerbaijan will have no choice.

Recent twists of the Armenian leadership in the foreign policy sphere could lead to an open conflict between rivals in the region. Azerbaijan's objective in the event of a conflict of interest is to localise it within Armenia and address the challenges from its own agenda, slightly changing the order of priority," Farhad Mammadov wrote.