Armenia says after peace treaty ratification, they could ‘discuss a new mandate’ for the EUMA

On Monday, Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Paruyr Hovhannisyan said that if the peace treaty with Azerbaijan is signed and ratified, they could discuss a new mandate for the EU mission in Armenia (EUMA).

‘It is not necessary to be limited only by the border. The creation of trust-building measures is in the mandate’, Hovhannisyan said.

The mission was deployed in January 2023 following Azerbaijani incursions into Armenia in 2021 and 2022. In late January, the European Council adopted a decision extending the mandate of the EUMA until February 2027.

However, the EUMA proved to be a major sticking point in the peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with Baku repeatedly demanding its withdrawal since September 2024.

Earlier in March, Armenia accepted Azerbaijan’s latest proposal of the peace treaty, which, if signed, would push the EUMA out of the shared border with Azerbaijan. This contradicted Armenia’s previous stance of seeming to resist the removal of the mission by offering other solutions, such as withdrawing the EUMA from sections of the border with Azerbaijan that have already been delimited.

Armenia ‘offered to withdraw EU monitors’ from delimited parts of border

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said that Armenia offered to withdraw the EU Monitoring Mission from sections of the border with Azerbaijan that have been delimited. Pashinyan made the comments in a one-and-a-half long hour interview with the public broadcaster on 22 November. Durin…

OC MediaArshaluys Barseghyan

Hovhannisyan told journalists on Monday that they could find the ‘right model to continue’ cooperation with the EUMA even in the most positive scenario, claiming that the provision of the peace treaty on third-party forces pertains to military presence.

When asked whether there was confidence that Azerbaijan would not demand the complete withdrawal of the EUMA from Armenia, Hovhannisyan said that the EUMA was a monitoring mission, and ‘logically there shouldn’t be such demands, but of course, it is difficult to say about confidence’.

The issue was also discussed in an interview with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Public TV on 21 March.

During the interview, Pashinyan stated that Armenia’s relations with ‘diplomatic missions or third parties or third countries’ in the territory of Armenia ‘are a sovereign matter of ours and they will be discussed and resolved on the bilateral level’.

He also made assurances that before the peace treaty enters into force there would be ‘no obstacles to the work’ of the EUMA, claiming that afterwards, Armenia and the EU ‘will agree on the future of the observation mission and the forms and methods of its activity’.

‘Our goal is to have peace and stability along our border and once the peace treaty is signed, we will have institutional peace and stability. And under those conditions we can stop bothering or bother less our esteemed EU observers’, Pashinyan said, adding that his government invited the EUMA ‘as a factor of peace and stability’. Unlike Armenia, which has constantly valued the role that the EUMA plays in the stability of the region, Azerbaijan and Russia have criticised the mission since its deployment, accusing it of collecting intelligence against Russia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, and calling the civilian mission a ‘paramilitary’ deployment or ‘a military presence’. The EUMA has also been accused of being co-opted by NATO.