Azerbaijan, Armenia hold renewed peace talks in Brussels

Azerbaijan and Armenia have held a fresh round of EU-mediated peace talks, while Russia offered a summit in Moscow in an effort to reassert a lead role in the normalisation process.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met in Brussels on Saturday for talks aimed at resolving their decades-long conflict for the control of Karabakh, the foreign ministry in Baku said in a statement.

European Council President Charles Michel was mediating the discussions, which come amid renewed tensions after Azerbaijan temporarily closed the Lachin corridor, the sole land link between Karabakh and Armenia.

Baku and Yerevan have been seeking to negotiate a peace agreement with the help of the European Union and United States, whose diplomatic engagement in the Caucasus has irked traditional regional power broker Russia.

Moscow on Saturday offered to host the two countries' foreign ministers and suggested the future peace treaty could be signed in Moscow.

Russia is ready "to organise a trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers in Moscow in the near future," the country's foreign ministry said in a statement.

It offered to hold later a "Russian-Azerbaijani-Armenian summit in Moscow to sign the relevant (peace) treaty."

Adding to the recent standoff with Yerevan, Azerbaijan's defence ministry said Armenian separatist forces in Karabakh "use radio interference against GPS navigation systems of local and foreign airlines' passenger aircraft flying through our country's airspace."

The alleged interference impacted two Azerbaijan Airlines aircraft on Thursday, the ministry said, adding that "such incidents pose a serious threat to aviation safety".

Relations between the two former Soviet republics have been tense since 1991 when the Armenian military occupied Karabakh, which is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions.

Most of the territory was liberated by Baku during a war in the fall of 2020 which ended after a Russian-brokered peace agreement and opened the door to normalisation.