- Armenia, Azerbaijan says they have finished the text of the treaty.
- The two have been locked in conflict for almost 40 years.
- Armenia must change the Constitution before the signed treaty: Baku.
Tbilisi/Baku: Armenian and Azerbaijan officials said Thursday that they had agreed the text of a peace agreement to end almost four decades of conflict between the countries of the south of the Caucasus, a sudden advance in a process of physical peace already often bitter.
The two postsoviet countries have fought against a series of wars since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a population mostly Ethnic Armenia at that time, separated from Azerbaijan with the support of Armenia.
The Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday that a eraser of peace agreement with Azerbaijan had been completed on its side.
“The Peace Agreement is ready to sign. The Republic of Armenia is ready to start consultations with the Republic of Azerbaijan on the date and place of signing the agreement,” said the Armenian Foreign Ministry in a statement.
In his statement, the Azerbaijan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “We observe with satisfaction that negotiations on the text of the eraser of the Peace Agreement and the establishment of interstate relationships between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been completed.”
However, the schedule to sign the agreement is uncertain since Azerbaijan has said that a prerequisite for its signature is a change in the Constitution of Armenia, which says it makes implicit claims of its territory.
Armenia denies such statements, but Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly said in recent months that the country's founding document must be replaced and has asked for a referendum to do so. A date has not been established.
The outbreak of hostilities at the end of the 1980s caused massive expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Azeri mostly Muslims of Armenia and Armenians, who are majority Christians, of Azerbaijan.
Peace conversations began after Azerbaijan resumed Karabakh by force in September 2023, which caused almost all 100,000 Armenians of the territory to Huyan to Armenia.
Both parties had said they wanted to sign a treaty to end the long -standing conflict, but progress has been slow and in time of relationships.
Its shared border of 1000 km (621 miles) is closed and very militarized.
In January, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, accused Armenia of representing a “fascist” threat that should be destroyed, in the comments that Armenia's leader called a possible attempt to justify a new conflict.
