Few details on Nagorno-Karabakh ‘agreement’ between Putin and Pashinyan

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s visit to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded with an ‘agreement’ concerning issues related to Nagorno-Karabakh, though details on the specifics remain scant.

‘We have reached an agreement with President Putin on a number of important issues, including the security of Nagorno-Karabakh, the unblocking of regional infrastructure and demarcation of Armenia and Azerbaijan’s borders’, Pashinyan told Vyacheslav Volodin, the Speaker of the Russian Parliament, in a televised meeting on Wednesday.

According to the document, both Putin and Pashinyan ‘stress the need for a quick solution to urgent humanitarian issues’ as well as the ‘political and diplomatic settlement’ of the conflict.

The two leaders also agreed to ‘accelerate’ the formation of a commission aimed at coordinating the demarcation and delimitation of the state borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan by the end of April — according to an agreement reached by Aliyev and Pashinyan in Brussels earlier in the month.

The agreements signed also committed the two countries, in largely non-specific terms, to intensify trilateral cooperation between Armenia, Russia, and Azerbaijan. Putin and Pashinyan also signed a number of bilateral agreements that concerned ‘cooperation’ in the fields of energy, culture, and education, among others.

The heads of the Armenian and Russian security councils, Armen Grigoryan, and Nikolay Patrushev, respectively, signed an agreement concerning information security, which included the ‘exchange of data in order to identify, prevent, suppress, and investigate offences related to using information and communication technologies for terrorist and other criminal purposes’.