Armenia-Azerbaijan: A Few Outstanding Issues To Be Breached, U.S. Says, Eyeing COP29 As 'Opportunity'

The United States said on Friday it's hoping that Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan could finalize a peace agreement by COP29, the United Nations annual climate conference, which will take place in Baku this fall, TURAN's Washington correspondent reports.

"Yesterday's meeting was to focus on how we might bridge what remaining gaps there are, because we see, as we look ahead to COP29 in Azerbaijan, that's an opportunity, potentially, for the two parties to come together and demonstrate to the world that they're entering a new relationship with one another," Tom Sullivan, the State Department's senior policy adviser to the Secretary of State, told TURAN's U.S. correspondent during a briefing at the Department's New York Foreign Press Center.

Sulivan, the State Department's Counselor, who was present at yesterday's trilateral meeting between Secretary Antony Blinken and his Azerbaijani, Armenian counterparts Jeyhun Bayramov and Ararat Mirzoyan, said that both sides have made "significant progress over the last couple of years on a number of specific elements of what could be a peace treaty."

"There were a few outstanding issues," he added. "... What we agreed to yesterday is that we will continue to identify some potential solutions to some of the issues that we need to resolve," he told TURAN's correspondent.

He went on to add, "The teams will continue to work over the coming days and weeks and see whether or not we can actually get to a place where the two countries are in position to finalize the peace agreement."

Sullivan also stressed that Secretary Bblinken had been engaged on this topic "since going back a number of years".

"We believe the prospects of peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan would be transformative, obviously, not for just their relationship, but for the whole region," he concluded.