Common Space: Will Armenia and Azerbaijan sign a peace treaty in 2025?
As the South Caucasus enters 2025, uncertainty surrounds the year ahead, Common Space writes. As noted, even the outgoing Biden administration in the United States, eager to facilitate a peace agreement before president-elect Donald Trump takes over on Jan. 20, couldn’t speed up the process. Some believe that Baku was anyway more focused on delaying an agreement until the new administration is in place. Yerevan had hoped that one could have been signed even if some points remain unresolved.
Though 2024 was relatively stable in the Armenia-Azerbaijan relations, for many in Armenia, the danger of a new escalation remains a possibility while Azerbaijan seeks to use its stronger position to solicit more concessions. Meanwhile, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will use the year ahead to prepare for new parliamentary elections by June 2026.
Just before the year ended, both Yerevan and Baku confirmed that 15 of 17 points in the draft Agreement on Peace and Establishment of Interstate Relations had been fully agreed. However, two outstanding points on dropping any mutual legal actions and prohibiting the deployment of third country forces remained.
Most notably, Azerbaijan demands that Armenia removes a controversial preamble from its constitution referencing the 1990 declaration on the unification of Soviet Armenia and Mountainous Karabakh. Some in Pashinyan’s circle maintain the preamble will anyway be removed as part of larger constitutional changes likely to be put to referendum in 2027.
Few also think Passhinyan will agree to the early withdrawal of the EU Mission in Armenia (EUMA).
EUMA can also deflect domestic criticism of further demarcation as the 2026 elections approach.
Baku appears concerned that while both the OSCE Minsk Group and EUMA exist then either might potentially focus on the right to return of the Artsakh Armenians that fled in 2023.
Armenia’s demilitarisation is just as controversial. Though it is unlikely that Yerevan could fight another war anytime soon, Azerbaijan notes that revanchist forces opposed to Pashinyan still exist inside Armenia and some groups in the diaspora. Analysts in Yerevan argue, however, that new weapon purchases from France and mainly India are necessary to replenish an arsenal depleted by the 2020 war in order to deter another incursion by Azerbaijan as seen in 2022.
