Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Wednesday will meet at a summit in Brussels to discuss steps following the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict amid protests opposing the talks in the Armenian capital Yerevan.
During their talks – mediated by the European Council President Charles Michel – Aliyev and Pashinian are expected to discuss the start of negotiations on a "comprehensive peace treaty."
Their meeting comes after a flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh on March 25 that saw renewed tensions between Yerevan and Baku.
On the eve of the summit, several thousand opposition supporters rallied Tuesday in Yerevan to denounce the government's handling of the territorial dispute with arch-foe Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Long-contested between the Caucasus neighbors, Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, was at the center of an all-out war in 2020 that claimed more than 6,500 lives before it ended with a Russian-brokered cease-fire agreement.
The pact saw Azerbaijan regain swathes of its previously Armenian occupied territories in what was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation, sparking weeks of mass anti-government protests.
Waving flags, protesters filled the capital's central Freedom Square on Tuesday evening, with many shouting anti-government slogans.
They then marched through downtown Yerevan, vowing to block traffic in the streets later in the evening.
One of the demonstrators, 58-year-old seamstress Marine Harutyunyan said: "We don't expect anything positive from tomorrow's meeting" between Pashinian and Aliyev.
On the other side, Yerevan recently called on Baku to start peace talks "without delay." Baku agreed, saying it had already put forward such a proposal a year ago.
Baku tabled in mid-March its set of framework proposals for the peace agreement that includes both sides' mutual recognition of territorial integrity.
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan sparked controversy at home when he said – commenting on the Azerbaijani proposal – that for Yerevan "the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not a territorial issue, but a matter of rights" of the local ethnic-Armenian population.
