PARIS (AFP) - Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said Friday he would not meet the prime minister of arch-foe Armenia as planned in Brussels next month because Yerevan demanded French leader Emmanuel Macron mediate.
Azerbaijan accuses France of backing Armenia in the two countries’ decades-long conflict over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Aliyev said he would not meet Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Brussels on December 7 because the Armenian leader demanded that Macron attend the talks.
Pashinyan “agreed to the meeting only on condition” that Macron take part, Aliyev told an international conference in Baku. “That means the meeting will not take place.”
He accused Pashinyan of attempting to “scupper the peace talks.”
Last month Macron and European Council President Charles Michel attended a meeting between Aliyev and Pashinyan in Prague.
On Friday, the Armenian foreign ministry said the meeting in Brussels should have the “same” format.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars -- in 2020 and in the 1990s -- over Azerbaijan’s Armenian-populated region of Nagorno Karabakh.
The six-week war in 2020 claimed the lives of more than 6,500 troops from both sides and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Aliyev and Pashinyan met several times this year in Brussels and Russia’s southern city of Sochi.