US says Armenia and Azerbaijan have made ‘further progress’ toward a peace deal
Associated PressWASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Armenia and Azerbaijan have made “further progress” toward a peace agreement in three days of U.S.-hosted talks between the two former Soviet republics that have repeatedly clashed over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. “I appreciate further progress toward this shared objective of an agreement to include agreement on some additional articles as well as a deepening understanding of the positions on outstanding issues, as well as the recognition that there remains hard work to be done to try to reach a final agreement,” Blinken said at the end of the closed-door talks at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute in northern Virginia. Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that only “strictly technical” issues remain in resolving one of the main disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan and that the two sides had agreed to recognize each other’s territorial integrity. But Putin said that on the “principal issues, there is an agreement,” and later said all that remained were “surmountable obstacles,” calling them differences in terminology and “strictly technical.” He said representatives of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan would meet in a week to try to resolve the differences.