President Ilham Aliyev: We want Armenia, today and in the future, never put under question our territorial integrity

In an interview with Euronews channel, President Ilham Aliyev touched upon peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Yes, I was optimistic about the timetable, because we exchanged several times with Armenia the comments on the original draft peace treaty, which Azerbaijan elaborated itself. After that, there have been six times of exchange of comments between the two countries, and when I was talking about that the last time to Euronews, I hoped that Armenia will not prolong the process of evaluation of our comments. We submitted the last comments to them on September 11, and received a response from them only two days ago. So, almost two months and a half, they had been evaluating the draft, which consists of several pages. What does that mean? That means that they want to artificially delay the process. Now, we are talking at the end of November, and the hopes for achieving peace and signing peace treaty by the end of the year are not very optimistic. But, I think that the timetable is not so important. Important is the agenda of both countries. It was Azerbaijan, who suffered occupation and ethnic cleansing. Million Azerbaijanis were deported by Armenian government. Devastation of the territory of almost 15,000 square kilometres. Nevertheless, we were the country, which made a proposal to sign a peace agreement, and to start working on the delimitation. So, Armenia, now after Karabakh portfolio is closed, I think, will be more willing to come to an agreement with us. Because after the restoration of our sovereignty and elimination of the illegal separatist regime in Karabakh, I think, the main factor, which prevented Armenia to be more courageous on negotiation track, don't exist any longer.

So, we will evaluate their latest proposals, which as I said, we received two days ago, and will comment on that. In the meantime, we are maintaining the contacts on the working-level between different officials and through different channels. I think there's no alternative for peace. If peace agreement is not signed that will be very bad for the whole region. We want a region of the Southern Caucasus to get rid of any risks. Of course, we want Armenia, today and in the future, never put under question our territorial integrity, and abandon completely any territorial claims to Azerbaijan.” the head of state said.