Against the background of the meeting held in Tehran between Iran’s Acting Foreign Minister Kani and Igor Khovaev, the special representative of the Russian Foreign Minister on Armenian-Azerbaijan settlement issues, a telephone conversation between the Foreign Ministers of Turkey and Azerbaijan took place. In parallel, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited Syunik, during which he made a rather remarkable statement for the first time that a referendum may be required in the process of Armenian-Azerbaijani demarcation and delimitation, based on the logic of territory exchange.
Nikol Pashinyan conventionally gave the example of “100 meters of territory from our side, 100 meters of territory from their side”, but it should be assumed that it is not about 100 meters of territory at all, otherwise it would hardly be possible to exchange such essentially insignificant spaces, so to speak. with “map” mechanisms. Pashinyan seems to be talking about a more significant issue, but it is not clear what it will refer to.
Is it significant that he speaks about it during his visit to Syunik, or is it not important? As I have already noticed, the fact that Khovayev, the special representative of the Russian Foreign Minister on Armenian-Azerbaijan settlement issues, went to Tehran and met with the acting Foreign Minister of Iran, suggests that there was quite a specific conversation at the “table” of the visit. To what extent the phone conversation with Fidan-Bayramov is directly connected with it, it is again difficult to say for sure, but the “cross-shaped” in the background of these contacts is also remarkable Nikol Pashinyan’s visit to the “crossroads”, where he also talked about the work of the “crossroads of peace”, saying that in that case there will be a lot of international traffic through the territory of Armenia.
By the way, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister said at the meeting with Khovayev that regional issues should be resolved without extra-regional players and with greater coordination between Russia, Iran and other governments. Iran implies that something is not agreed with it, something was discussed “insufficiently systematically”. The work of “Khachmeruk” promises Armenia a “big flow”, but perhaps it promises Iran a significant loss of leverage vis-à-vis Azerbaijan and Turkey.
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