By Felix Light and Nailia Bagirova
TBILISI/BAKU (Reuters) -The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan held substantive talks in Abu Dhabi on Thursday, their governments said, in what amounted to the most serious direct negotiations yet in a fitful process to end almost four decades of conflict.
The two sides said in March they had agreed on the text of a draft peace agreement, but progress since then has been sporadic and slow.
The talks between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in the capital of the United Arab Emirates were the leaders’ first formal meeting since they approved the draft.
In statements, the countries’ two foreign ministries said Pashinyan and Aliyev had discussed items including the delimitation of their shared 1,000-km (621-mile) border and agreed to continue dialogue at various levels.
A senior Azerbaijani government source said the talks took place in a “highly constructive atmosphere.”
Armenia said the sides had agreed to continue talks on a bilateral basis and that the dialogue had been “result-oriented”.
A peace deal could transform the South Caucasus, an energy-producing region neighbouring Russia, Europe, Turkey and Iran that is criss-crossed by oil and gas pipelines but riven by closed borders and longstanding ethnic conflicts.
Armenia and Azerbaijan, which both won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, have been at loggerheads since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh – an Azerbaijani region that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population – broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
In 2023, Azerbaijan retook Karabakh, prompting about 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia. Both sides have since said they want to sign a treaty on a formal end to the conflict.
Some issues, including Azerbaijan’s demand that Armenia change its constitution to remove an indirect reference to Karabakh, are yet to be resolved.
Russia, which previously deployed peacekeepers in Karabakh, said it fully supported the diplomatic process and hoped it would bring “predictability, stability and peace to the region.”
(Reporting by Felix Light and Nailia Bagirova; Writing by Felix Light and Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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