Azerbaijan wants peace talks with Armenia without Western involvement

Azerbaijan wants bilateral peace talks with Armenia and believes they can reach an agreement quickly without the need for Western mediation, Azerbaijani presidential adviser Hikmet Hajiyev told Reuters on Tuesday.
“A peace agreement is not nuclear physics. If there is good will, the fundamental principles of a peace agreement can be worked out in a short time,” Hajiyev said.
But on the question of Western involvement, he added: “We need peace in our region, not in Washington, Paris or Brussels.”
Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought two wars in the past three decades over the territory of Karabakh, a region which is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but where a majority ethnic Armenian population broke away and established de facto independence in the 1990s.
Azerbaijan recaptured it in September, prompting a mass exodus of almost all of the territory’s 120,000 ethnic Armenians.