Prague EPC summit on the border
6 October 2022 Prague meeting at which Armenia and Azerbaijan affirmed commitment to the UN Charter and the 1991 Almaty Declaration as the basis for mutual territorial recognition. The statement effectively placed Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan’s recognised borders.
Account
Statement
On 6 October 2022, on the margins of the first European Political Community summit in Prague, Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev met with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Council President Charles Michel. The public statement said Armenia and Azerbaijan confirmed commitment to the UN Charter and the 1991 Almaty Declaration, through which the former Soviet republics recognised each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
In practical terms, that meant using Soviet republican borders as the legal basis for Armenia-Azerbaijan delimitation. Since Nagorno-Karabakh had been inside the Azerbaijan SSR, Prague was widely understood as Armenia's clearest post-2020 acknowledgement that Karabakh belonged to Azerbaijan's internationally recognised territory.
Why it was consequential
Prague did not end the conflict. It did, however, change the diplomatic grammar. Before 2020, Armenia and the de facto Artsakh authorities insisted that status remained open and that self-determination required a mechanism outside Azerbaijani sovereignty. After Prague, the Armenian government increasingly shifted to rights and security for Karabakh Armenians under a territorial-integrity framework.
That shift was shaped by coercive context. It followed the September 2022 attack on Armenia and preceded the Lachin blockade. Supporters argued that explicit border recognition was necessary to protect Armenia proper. Critics argued that the government had surrendered Karabakh's political claim without extracting enforceable guarantees for its people.
Contradiction
The contradiction of Prague is that it was rational from the standpoint of Armenian state survival and disastrous from the standpoint of Artsakh's existing political project editorial. It tried to stabilise the Armenia-Azerbaijan border by accepting a legal premise that weakened the case for international intervention in Karabakh's status.
The later sequence is stark: Prague in October 2022, blockade in December 2022, Azerbaijani checkpoint in April 2023, military operation in September 2023, exodus, and dissolution of Artsakh effective January 2024. Prague did not cause each step mechanically, but it belongs to the diplomatic environment in which Azerbaijan understood that the status question had largely been closed internationally.