The US invites Azerbaijan and Armenia to the NATO summit in July

The US plans to invite Armenia and Azerbaijan to the upcoming NATO summit in Washington in July, Azerbaijani media Turan reported.
Unnamed sources told Turan that the summit could facilitate bilateral talks on the ongoing peace process between the two countries and would be "a wonderful opportunity that is too good to miss".
The news comes as US Assistant Secretary of State James O'Brien is due to arrive in Baku on June 27. This will be his third trip to the South Caucasus within two months.
"With the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, we are aware that now is the time to make peace," O'Brien told a Senate committee meeting before the trip.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a successful offensive to reclaim the Nagorno-Karabakh region, recognized by international law as Azerbaijani territory but de facto under the control of the self-proclaimed ethnic Armenian republic since the early 1990s.
Since then, peace talks have been ongoing between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but no final conclusion has yet been reached.
The growing ties between Armenia and Western institutions such as NATO also illustrate the shift in Russian influence in the region.
Yerevan has long relied on Russia as its main regional ally. Relations between the two countries deteriorated after Russian peacekeeping forces refused to act during both the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 and the Azerbaijani offensive in September 2023.
Since then, Armenia has openly sought to establish new defense partnerships.
Earlier in June, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that Armenia would withdraw from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a military alliance consisting of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
"We will decide when to leave. We will not return, there is no other way," Pashinyan said. | BGNES