The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet on Sunday in Brussels, the European Union announced yesterday Monday, a new step in the reconciliation efforts of the two Caucasian states that have been in conflict for thirty years over the control of Nagorno-Karabakh.

European Council President Charles Michel will receive Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev in order to “promote stability in the South Caucasus and normalization [σ.σ. των σχέσεων] of the two countries,” according to the press release released.

The meeting in Brussels comes after the US said there had been “tangible progress” in four days of intensive talks between the parties in early May in Washington. According to American diplomacy, the conclusion of a peace agreement between Yerevan and Baku for the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave is now “visible”.

Messrs. Pashinyan and Aliyev also agreed to meet, together, with the French president and the German prime minister on the sidelines of the June 1 summit in Moldova, according to the European Council announcement.

The leaders of the two countries also pledged to meet in Brussels “as often as necessary” to “manage developments on the ground”.

The two former Soviet republics of the Caucasus have been involved in two wars, in the 1990s and 2020, over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region inhabited mainly by Armenians that broke away from Azerbaijan more than three decades ago.

Tensions, already high, escalated even more when Baku announced on April 23 that it had installed a checkpoint on the road axis of the Lachin Corridor, the only one connecting Armenia to the separatist enclave, which has been blocked for months resulting in shortages and power outages.

Russia, for its part, treated the talks in Washington with reservations, judging that there is no “alternative” to its own mediation between the two countries.

After a brief war in the fall of 2020 in which Azerbaijan took territory in the region, Baku and Yerevan signed an agreement brokered by Moscow.

Since then, Russian soldiers have been guaranteeing the maintenance of peace in Nagorno-Karabakh, but Armenia has been complaining for months that this mission is ineffective.