After the actual failure of the talks between the Armenian and Azerbaijani Presidents in Geneva, the parties have started to play blame game. Azerbaijan was outraged by the fact that after the negotiating round with Ilham Aliyev, Serzh Sargsyan made a separate uncoordinated statement on the results of the meeting. It should be reminded that Sargsyan said at a meeting with the Armenian community in Switzerland that Armenia does not accept the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, according to which Nagorno-Karabakh will be part of Azerbaijan. Novruz Mammadov, assistant to Azerbaijan’s president for foreign policy issues, in turn, reproached Sargsyan for violating the agreement reached at the talks that no statements were to be made other than on agreed points.
President Sargsyan, in turn, commented on Baku's accusations as follows: "A very strange situation has been created for me, when after the Geneva talks the Azerbaijani side is attempting to emphasize with a special cruelty that I have violated some kind of agreements. It is honestly strange, and I am waiting for our next meeting with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev in order to ask my colleague what had angered him".
"Moreover, those who talk are people who shouldn't have absolutely any information about our conversation, because it was the two of us talking, and If we had an agreement on non-disclosure, then how did his assistants, or, I don’t know, deputies and others get acquainted with the topic? I reassure you I haven’t said a single word from our conversation anywhere," Sargsyan said.
But there is clear inconsistency here and an attempt to substitute the topic of discussion. No one reproached the Armenian president for making public any details of the face-to-face talks. Moreover, the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh is not a priori a subject of negotiations for Azerbaijan - and Sargsyan confirmed it by his own words. It's a different matter: the final statement was agreed between the negotiating parties with the participation of the OSCE Minsk Group mediators, and an agreement was reached that no statements were to be made other than on agreed points. It is quite logical that the co-chairs and the delegations of both countries were aware of it. After all, the text of the final statement was not written by Aliyev and Sargsyan, but with the help by their "assistants and advisers", as well as the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group. Accordingly, at that time other details were agreed - for example, it was agreed that the parties would not make other statements at the government level. Of course, the foreign ministers and advisers on foreign policy issues on both sides should be put in the course of such agreements - at least, in order to observe them. There is no doubt that the issue of the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh does not apply to the agreed points.
Referring to his words at the meeting with the Armenian community of Switzerland, Sargsyan said: "Is there anything new here? I repeated what I’ve been saying for 20 years, what we are talking about for 25 years ... " This rather strange statement is also surprising. It's not about the Armenian president saying something new, but about the context in which he made his statement. After all, President Ilham Aliyev could also make a separate statement immediately after the Genev meeting, saying that "Karabakh will never and under no circumstances get independence." Azerbaijan has also said about it "for already 25 years" and has not back away from its stand. But, if the parties are serious about achieving peace, then it is only logical that the most problematic issues are postponed, harsh statements are not made during the intensification of the settlement process in order not to undermine the whole process. But that's exactly what the Armenian president did.
Sargsyan is not new to politics to fail to foresee consequences of his own statements. And now he is not under any serious internal political pressure that could explain his behavior right after the talks - the elections were already held, the situation in the country is stable. There is no doubt that the breakdown of the Geneva round was a pre-calculated move aimed at delaying the negotiation process. The interim task of Armenian diplomacy is to introduce mechanisms for investigating incidents on the front line in isolation from real progress in the settlement. By its conduct, the Armenian side demonstrates a desire to delay negotiations until it reaches this goal.
