A top-level meeting of Armenian and Azeri leaders is very unlikely to take place on the sidelines of the NATO summit due to start in Romania later this week, it transpired over the weekend.

Before that, it was expected that Armenia’s newly elected President and current Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan would meet Azerbaijan’s head of state Ilham Aliyev anytime between 2-4 April in Bucharest.

The initiative of the meeting in Bucharest came from the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an international format brokering a Karabakh peace.

Whereas the Armenian side had positively responded to the initiative, official Baku did not provide its consent to such a meeting later, saying there was no “subject or purpose” for talks.

That decision was not welcomed in Yerevan, but officials in the Armenian capital denied they had made a request to Baku for such a meeting, as alleged by the Azerbaijani side.

“Without any serious reasoning, the Azerbaijani side has torpedoed the scheduled meeting of the heads of state of Armenia and Azerbaijan,” acting Foreign Ministry press secretary Tigran Balayan commented.

And the US co-chair of the Minsk Group, Matthew Bryza, said that “the whole matter has to do with the protocol, since Sargsyan’s inauguration is scheduled for April 9, therefore in Bucharest, according to protocol, Sargsyan will not appear as president yet.”

The Azerbaijani side, however, presented a somewhat different motivation for the refusal. “Baku is always ready for negotiations, but a subject and concrete goal of these negotiations is needed,” Novruz Mamedov, head of the foreign ties division in the Aliyev administration, told media.

Azerbaijan’s leadership has dropped hints that Sargsyan’s interest in such a meeting could first of all be explained by his desire to show thus to the opposition inside the country his legitimacy as elected leader “recognized even in Baku”.

Armenian officials, however, have denied that it was Armenia’s initiative for Sargsyan and Aliyev to meet in Bucharest, but, nevertheless, reaffirmed Armenia’s overall readiness for further negotiations.

The Azeri statements came against the backdrop of Azerbaijan’s continuing calls for revising the Minsk Group format of the talks and transferring negotiations under the United Nations’ umbrella.

"The Azerbaijani letter to the OSCE about dissolution of the Minsk Group was sent before discussions of the Azerbaijani resolution [on Karabakh] at the UN General Assembly,” spokesman Balayan said in an interview with Arminfo news agency late last week. “It once again proves that Azerbaijani officials’ insistences and steps have nothing to do with their responsibility to continue the process of peaceful settlement, and they have a false, demonstrative nature. And one of its striking illustrations is the failure of the meeting of the Azerbaijani President and the Armenian President-elect scheduled in April in the framework of NATO Summit in Bucharest."
Among other issues, the April 2-4 NATO summit in Bucharest is expected to outline prospects of the geopolitical development of the South Caucasus region, including Georgia’s prospects of becoming a NATO member.