Armenia, Azerbaijan top diplomats hold first bilateral talks since 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war

The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan were due to hold Saturday their first bilateral talks since the 2020 war between the arch-foes for control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, officials said.

Held in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, the talks are expected to build on an agreement the Caucasus countries' leaders reached under EU mediation in May to "advance discussions" on a peace treaty.

"This is the first meeting between the ministers, and we hope that it will bring in a result," Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said on Friday.

The atmosphere was tense ahead of the meeting between Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov as the both countries' defence ministries traded accusations of initiating a shootout at their shared border.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars - in 2020 and in the 1990s - over Azerbaijan's Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Six weeks of fighting in autumn 2020 claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades, and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.

Following its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, increasingly isolated Moscow lost its status as a primary mediator in the conflict.

The European Union has since led the Armenia-Azerbaijan normalisation process, which involves peace talks, border delimitation and the reopening of transport links.

Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met in Brussels in April and May and European Council President Charles Michel has said their next meeting is scheduled for July or August.

Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives.