The border between Armenia and Azerbaijan is set to get its final shape after years of conflict. Baku and Yerevan announced on Tuesday they had started fixing their border, as part of normalization efforts between the two countries that had been locked in a decadeslong territorial conflict.
Last month, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed to Baku's demand to return four frontier villages that were part of Azerbaijan when it was part of the Soviet Union. The two countries reconfirmed last week to advance on border delimitation in the area based on Soviet-era maps.
On Tuesday, the two countries' Interior Ministries announced the beginning of delimitation works on the ground. Azerbaijan said expert groups are conducting "clarification of coordinates based on a geodesic study of the terrain," while Armenia ruled out "the transfer of any parts of Armenia's sovereign territory" to Baku as a result of the delimitation.
Fresh rallies erupted in Armenia following the announcement. Dozens of protesters blocked the crucial Armenia-Georgia highway at several points, including near Lake Sevan and the town of Noyemberyan, close to the border with Azerbaijan, Armenian media reported.
The four abandoned settlements that are to be returned to Azerbaijan, Lower Askipara, Baghanis Ayrum, Kheirimly and Gizilhajili, were taken over by Armenian forces in the 1990s, forcing their ethnic Azerbaijani residents to flee.
The area has strategic importance for landlocked Armenia. Several small sections of the highway to Georgia, vital for the country's foreign trade, could end up in the territory to be handed back to Azerbaijan. The delimited border will also run close to a major Russian gas pipeline, and the area has advantageous military positions. Pashinyan has insisted on the need to resolve remaining border disputes with Azerbaijan "to avoid a new war."
On Saturday, he said Russian border guards, deployed in the area since 1992, will be replaced by Armenian servicemen. "Russian border guards will withdraw from the area and border guards of Armenia and Azerbaijan will be cooperating to guard the state border on their own."
He also called border delimitation a "significant change on the ground" as the two countries "now have a border and not a line of contact, which is a sign of peace."
Last autumn, Azerbaijani troops recaptured the Karabakh region from Armenian separatists in a lightning offensive that effectively ended a bloody three-decade standoff between the Caucasus neighbors over control of the mountainous region.
While both Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev say a wider peace agreement is within their reach, lingering territorial disputes pose a constant threat of a fresh flareup.
Addressing an event in Baku on Tuesday, Aliyev said his country and Armenia were close to signing a peace deal. "We are close as never before," Aliyev said, adding, "We now have a common understanding of what the peace agreement should look like, we only need to address details."
Azerbaijan asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Tuesday to move forward with a case accusing Armenia of carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, one of two competing cases launched by the foes over their decades of ethnic conflict.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have each sought rulings at the ICJ, also known as the World Court, against the other over the fallout of conflicts dating to the breakup of the Soviet Union, mainly over Karabakh.
Ethnic Armenians won a war in the 1990s that saw hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis flee homes in and around Karabakh. The situation has largely reversed since 2020, with Azerbaijan recapturing control of Karabakh in military victories and thousands of Armenians fleeing.
On Monday, Armenia asked the ICJ to throw out the case brought by Azerbaijan on technical grounds, following a request a week earlier by Azerbaijan to dismiss the case brought by Armenia. Final rulings in either case could be years away, and the court has no way to enforce its rulings.
Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov on Tuesday told judges Armenia's objections to the court's jurisdiction should be dismissed. Armenia first filed its case at the ICJ in 2021, accusing Azerbaijan of glorifying racism against Armenians, allowing hate speech against them and destroying Armenian cultural sites, in violation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Azerbaijan brought its own case against Yerevan a week later, alleging that Armenia had carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing from the early 1990s until 2020. Both sides deny the other's accusations.
Hearings for now cover only legal objections to the jurisdiction of the ICJ and will not go into the merits of the discrimination claims.
