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Peace talks between Yerevan and Baku had not suspended, Ruben Rubinyan, a deputy Armenian parliament speaker, said at a panel discussion on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum on Friday.

Azerbaijani presidential advisor Hikmet Hajiyev, Turkey’s special envoy for normalization talks with Armenia, Serdar Kilic, and Toivo Klaar, EU’s Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the Crisis in Georgia, were in attendance of the discussion.

“After the developments in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, where were no meetings on the level of leaders and foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, the sides continued to exchange comments on the draft peace treaty. This is a positive development," Rubinyan said.

He recalled that a trilateral meeting of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was held in the margins of the Munich Security Conference on February 17. Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov held two-day negotiations in Berlin on February 28-29.

"In recent years, Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed the basic principles of peace at various forums. It's the mutual recognition of each other's territorial integrity based on the Alma-Ata Declaration.The second principle agreed was that the delimitation and further demarcation of the state border between Armenia and Azerbaijan would be conducted on the basis of the Alma-Ata Declaration. The other major issue was and is connectivity and it's agreed that all regional communications would be unblocked based on the principles of sovereignty, jurisdiction, equality and reciprocity,” the deputy speaker remarked.

“If we manage to basically write in these principles which have been agreed in the peace treaty, peace is more than achievable in a short timeframe. Unfortunately, I can’t say that we’ve managed to do that. On our part, obviously we are doing everything we can to reflect these principles in the peace treaty. We haven’t seen so much eagerness from Azerbaijan, at least it’s our assessment, but we hope that we will reach this,” Rubinyan noted.