Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s chief policy adviser, Hikmet Hajiyev, has stated that Baku is demanding the withdrawal of the European Union monitoring mission before a peace treaty can be signed with Armenia. The EU deployed the monitoring mission in early 2023 along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border following an escalation of gunfire exchanges. Subsequently, Azerbaijani forces overran the last Armenian-held areas of the hotly contested Nagorno-Karabakh territory in September 2023, spurring the mass exodus of the Karabakh Armenian…
