YEREVAN. March 23 (Interfax) - Armenia will sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan based on the written agreements reached at the top level to date, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said.
"There will be a peace agreement. And it will be based on the written documents reached by now at the top level," Pashinyan said at a government meeting on Thursday.
"And we should not deviate from the path of developing and strengthening Armenia and consolidating our democracy even for a moment," Pashinyan said.
In an address to the nation on the Nowruz holiday on March 18, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said, "There is one precondition for Armenia to live comfortably on a territory of 29,000 square kilometers, that is, accept our condition and officially recognize Karabakh as Azerbaijan's territory, sign a peace treaty with us, delimitate the border in line with our conditions."
Pashinyan described Aliyev's remarks as "an act of aggression against Armenia."
"The Azerbaijani president's statement can be seen as sending the following message: he said openly and literally that Armenia must agree to Azerbaijan's conditions, or otherwise there'll be no peace agreement. It's hard to interpret this other than an act of aggression toward Armenia and a blatant violation of the agreements reached at the top level," Pashinyan said.
Azerbaijan's actions "are directing the situation toward a new escalation," he said.
Delimitating the Armenian-Azerbaijani border based on historical maps presented by Baku is unacceptable to Yerevan, Pashinyan said.
"Following the statements adopted in Prague and Sochi, which stipulate that the borders of the Soviet republics have become state borders, Azerbaijan has kept speaking about delimitation based on some historical maps, which is absolutely unacceptable for the very simple reason that this goes against the written agreements reached at the top level," he said.
"Yerevan insists that, as Azerbaijan has violated the agreements, there is a need for reliable international mechanisms to implement both a future peace agreement between Yerevan and Baku and agreements to be reached in a negotiating format between Stepanakert and Baku," he said.
The parties to a four-sided meeting between Pashinyan, Aliyev, French President Emmanuel Macron, and President of the European Council Charles Michel in October 2022 adopted a statement in which Armenia and Azerbaijan reaffirmed their commitment to the UN Charter and the 1991 Almaty Declaration, thereby recognizing each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Aliyev, and Pashinyan also adopted a joint statement in Sochi in October 2022, which says that Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to refrain from using force and threats to use force and discuss and settle all problems exclusively based on the mutual recognition of their sovereignty, territorial integrity, and inviolability of their borders in line with the UN Charter and the 1991 Almaty Declaration.