President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev made on Wednesday in Baku an unprecedented announcement, saying that “opening of the Armenian-Turkish border is the business of the two countries and no one should interfere in the process.”

“Why is the international community trying to save Armenia, why is it trying to open the Armenian-Turkish border to provide Armenia with open air to breathe?” asked Aliyev during the session of the Council of Ministers of Azerbaijan, being broadcast on the state TV channel of Azerbaijan.

Referring to the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, the president of Azerbaijan said that the international community “displays indifference towards the fact of the occupation of Azeri territories by Armenia.”

“How can we assess the current situation if our interests are ignored, if they shut their eyes to the occupation of our territories? Instead, huge efforts are made to take the aggressor country out of the hard economic situation,” Aliyev said.

This position, since the ‘soccer diplomacy’ in 2008, is unprecedented, both from the Turkish and Azeri sides, which always linked the normalization of the Armenian-Turkish relations and the opening of the border with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

According to Armenian-based analysts, such a ‘rational’ statement shows that “Azerbaijan understands that its steps taken against the normalization of the Armenian-Turkish relations have no prospect.”

“Recently quite serious messages were sent to Azerbaijan by both the United States and European countries, making it understand that they are not going to tolerate the blackmail of Azerbaijan,” Stepan Safaryan, head of the opposition Heritage party’s parliamentary faction, told ArmeniaNow. “The blackmail policy of Azerbaijan reached its climax when it started ruining the US policy over the Armenian-Turkish normalization.”

According to Safaryan, the publication of a large article on Aliyev’s huge property in The Washington Post (March 8) was quite a serious step. Another critical message was the fact that Azerbaijan has not been invited to participate in the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington DC.

“These steps obviously stressed that the United States is angry; and Azerbaijan understands quite well that nothing is accidental, and it [Azerbaijan] must understand that its game has no prospect,” Safaryan explains.

While Aliyev is modifying his position, Turkey continues to link Armenian-Turkish relations with the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The border was closed in 1993 when the Azeri lands were occupied. Now we want to correct it,” stated Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Ankara airport after returning from Washington on Wednesday, suggesting that [Armenians] “return the Aghdam and Fizuli districts”, in return to which, they [Turkey] will be ready to open the Armenian-Turkish border.