MOSCOW (Reuters) – Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday said Armenia was ready to sign a peace deal with Azerbaijan by the end of the year, and would guarantee the safety of all Azerbaijani citizens on its territory, Russia’s TASS news agency reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last week said he believed a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan was achievable if both sides showed goodwill, playing down the difficulty of reaching an agreement on their shared border.
Azerbaijan last month mounted a lightning offensive to seize control of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been governed by ethnic Armenians with Armenia’s support for three decades.
Most of Karabakh’s 120,000 or so ethnic Armenians fled to Armenia.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
