YEREVAN — Azerbaijan added another complication Wednesday to its unfinished peace process with Armenia when Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov publicly linked its completion to the adoption of a new Armenian constitution.
Bayramov told reporters that Baku’s position remained unchanged and said Azerbaijan was closely following Armenia’s constitutional process. He asserted that the joint declaration adopted in Washington states that Armenia must adopt a new Constitution before the normalization process can be completed.
The published declaration contains no such provision.
The official text signed in Washington records the initialing of the peace agreement, the parties’ commitment to normalization, regional connectivity, and respect for sovereignty and internationally recognized borders.
Six days earlier, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had said precisely that Armenia’s Constitution was not part of the bilateral agenda. “We discussed all the issues on our agenda with the president of Azerbaijan, but the constitution is not on our agenda,” Pashinyan told reporters Sept. 3. He described the constitution as “an internal issue of the Republic of Armenia.”
Armenia is independently preparing a new constitution, and Pashinyan has said the draft will remove the existing reference to the 1990 Declaration of Independence. His government presents that process as an internal decision connected to its broader effort to leave the Karabakh conflict behind.
Taken together, those developments underscore how far the current process remains from anything that can credibly be described as a settled peace.
A peace treaty that still comes with conditions
The Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement was initialed in Washington in August 2025, but it has not entered into force.
Its published text already addresses the central legal question Baku says concerns it. Armenia and Azerbaijan recognize the former Soviet republican boundaries as their international borders, affirm that neither has territorial claims against the other, and undertake not to use force or threaten force against one another’s territorial integrity.
Baku’s position remained unchanged and said Azerbaijan was closely following Armenia’s constitutional process.
Article IV goes further, requiring both sides to refrain from intervening in each other’s internal affairs. Article XII states that neither party may invoke domestic legislation as justification for failing to perform the agreement.
Against that language, the continuing constitutional demand raises an obvious question: If Armenia has formally agreed that it has no territorial claim against Azerbaijan and the treaty itself obliges both countries to respect each other’s sovereignty, why must Armenia’s constitution still be altered before peace can be concluded?
Bayramov’s Sept. 9 statement makes clear that Baku continues to regard Armenian constitutional change as part of the unfinished business of normalization.
A military position 3 kilometers inside Armenia
On Sept. 5, military journalist Davit Galstyan published satellite imagery that shows Azerbaijan expanding and reinforcing a military position in Armenia’s Syunik province established during the Azerbaijani advances of 2021.
According to Galstyan’s analysis, the position extends approximately 3 kilometers into territory identified as Armenian using Google Maps and a 1974 Soviet General Staff map. Satellite images from May and July 2025 show sections of the position being newly equipped or expanded, while later imagery suggested work may have continued. The construction itself did not take place this week; the detailed public documentation of its extent did.
The location makes the report particularly sensitive. Galstyan notes that it sits in one of Armenia’s narrowest territorial corridors, with only about 26 kilometers separating that area from Armenia’s border with Nakhichevan. He has previously reported similar reinforcement at another Azerbaijani position farther southeast.
The initialed peace agreement itself states that the former Soviet boundaries became the international borders of the independent states and must be respected as such. It also commits the parties to continue border delimitation through their respective commissions.
Why is an Azerbaijani military position located kilometers inside territory identified as Armenian being strengthened while peace is simultaneously described as established?
The prisoners peace has not brought home
Human rights lawyer Siranush Sahakyan, who represents Armenian detainees before the European Court of Human Rights, said at a Sept. 4 press conference that the prisoners face severe restrictions on independent legal, humanitarian and family contact. She has also raised allegations of physical abuse and religiously motivated mistreatment.
Sahakyan argued that religion cannot be separated from the treatment of Armenian prisoners or from the wider postwar environment. She linked their experience in detention to the destruction of Armenian Christian cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh and said the prisoners’ Christian identity increased their vulnerability.
“We have seen targeted actions involving religious symbols,” Sahakyan said. In cases involving tattoos of crosses, she said, “they were burned, with the cross removed from the skin through torture.” According to Sahakyan, Armenian prisoners were allowed some limited reading material while access to the Bible was prohibited, and there were cases in which detainees were “forced to read the Quran.” Sahakyan said those reported practices led her to conclude that “being a Christian makes a person more vulnerable” in Azerbaijani detention.
The allegations are serious. Azerbaijan categorically rejects them.
On Sept. 5, Azerbaijani Ombudsperson Sabina Aliyeva described claims of torture, religious discrimination, destruction of Christian symbols, denial of access to the Bible and forced Quran reading as “unfounded and biased.” Her office characterized the accusations as an effort to damage the ongoing peace process and said serious allegations should not be presented without credible evidence.
If Sahakyan’s allegations are false, unrestricted and credible humanitarian monitoring could help establish that. If they are accurate, the inability of independent organizations to regularly access detainees becomes considerably more alarming.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said this week that there is currently no agreement allowing it to resume visits to Armenians held in Azerbaijan. Zara Amatuni of the ICRC’s Armenian delegation said the organization remains ready to act as a neutral intermediary, but had not received the necessary confirmation for a renewed visit.
A voice from inside the prison
The Azerbaijani government’s account faced an even more direct challenge on Wednesday when Davit Ishkhanyan, former speaker of the National Assembly of Artsakh, delivered a recorded message from Azerbaijani imprisonment.
Ishkhanyan specifically addressed Aliyeva’s claim that she conducts confidential meetings with Armenian detainees and that their rights are protected. He confirmed that she had met them three times during roughly three years of detention, most recently on May 5.
His description of those meetings was different from Baku’s.
Ishkhanyan said the prisoners had used their meetings with the ombudsperson to raise violations of their rights and international legal norms, asking for her intervention. He emphasized that their central complaints were not about coffee, food or ordinary prison conditions, but about legal rights, access to documents and the ability to defend themselves.
Ishkhanyan said that in May he asked Aliyeva to help provide his family with the Azerbaijani-language version of the Feb. 5 judgment issued by the Baku Military Court. More than four months later, he said, neither his family nor his lawyers had received the full document.
An Azerbaijani military position located kilometers inside territory identified as Armenian being strengthened while peace is simultaneously described as established.
He also said defense attorneys were not being provided with indictments or judgments and that prisoners were obstructed from sending legal material in their possession to representatives outside Azerbaijan.
He raised another potentially consequential issue. Ishkhanyan said that since August 2025, he and other detainees had been unable to issue powers of attorney to representatives in Armenia who could act on their behalf inside Armenia or internationally. He attributed that inability to obstacles created by Azerbaijani state institutions.
He also said the detainees had not received the Aug. 6 appellate judgment following a hearing he described as lasting only 14 minutes.
Ishkhanyan said he had appealed to Armenia’s human rights defender in May seeking assistance and described the result as “zero.” He publicly invited the Armenian ombudsman to visit the Umbaki penitentiary and meet the prisoners directly.
He also called on Armenian state bodies to obtain the indictments, judgments and related documents themselves and determine whether the Azerbaijani proceedings contain allegations extending beyond the individual defendants to Armenian statehood and the Armenian people.
The significance of Ishkhanyan’s recording lies in its timing. Azerbaijan’s ombudsman has just publicly assured the outside world that detainees’ rights are respected. One of the prisoners she says she has personally interviewed has now described unresolved legal complaints that he says were raised with her months ago.
That discrepancy warrants independent examination.
The prisoners occupy an unusual place in the architecture of normalization for another reason: their release is not guaranteed by the initialed peace agreement.
The woman asking to go to Baku
That uncertainty has pushed families toward their own humanitarian initiatives.
Veronika Zonabend, wife of imprisoned former Artsakh State Minister Ruben Vardanyan, has been seeking to organize an international women’s humanitarian delegation to Azerbaijan to visit Armenian detainees.
On Sept. 8, Zonabend appealed to Armenian Security Council Secretary Alen Simonyan after reports of a possible visit to Baku. She asked whether he would meet detainees, speak with their families beforehand and carry letters from relatives.
Azerbaijani media outlets have simultaneously raised a remarkable possibility concerning Zonabend herself.
On Aug. 31, the Azerbaijani outlet Unikal examined whether she could face prosecution if she entered Azerbaijan because of a 2022 visit to Nagorno-Karabakh. The report discussed provisions under which an alleged illegal border crossing could potentially expose her to a prison sentence of up to five years.
The report did not establish that Azerbaijani authorities have issued an arrest warrant or formally charged Zonabend.
A woman attempting to organize a humanitarian visit to her imprisoned husband and other Armenian detainees is confronted with Azerbaijani media discussion of whether entering the country could expose her to imprisonment.
The dead are disappearing too
Caucasus Heritage Watch reported on Sept. 5 that satellite imagery documented the destruction of the Old Armenian-Russian Cemetery in Shushi between May 9 and May 14, 2026.
The site contained at least 40 burial markers, including five medieval Armenian khachkars dating from the 12th and 13th centuries and 35 19th-century gravestones. Satellite images showed the cemetery being leveled during construction associated with a wastewater and stormwater treatment facility.
The cemetery preserved evidence of Armenian residents, Russian military personnel and other people who shaped the city’s 19th-century history.
A peace unfolding alongside the destruction of one community’s physical record presents a much more difficult proposition.
191 people still missing
Another figure released this week illustrates how incomplete the human aftermath remains.
Armenia’s Investigative Committee said Sept. 8 that 191 people remain missing from the 2020 war — 172 service members and 19 civilians. It put the death toll from the 44-day war at 3,833, including 3,755 service members and 78 civilians.
For governments, six years can constitute a new diplomatic era. For families who still do not know whether a son, father or relative is alive, dead or buried somewhere unidentified, the war does not end according to the diplomatic calendar.
Normalization is moving faster than resolution
The Armenian government has promoted regional connectivity and economic interdependence as mechanisms for reducing the likelihood of another war. New transit infrastructure is being developed as part of a broader vision in which commerce and open routes replace military confrontation. Greater connectivity could reduce Armenia’s isolation, expand markets and weaken dependencies that have constrained its foreign policy for decades.
Azerbaijan’s foreign minister says constitutional change in Armenia is still necessary. Satellite analysis indicates that an Azerbaijani military position extending approximately 3 kilometers into territory identified as Armenian has been reinforced. Armenian prisoners remain without renewed ICRC access. Their lawyer alleges religiously targeted torture, including the burning of cross tattoos, denial of Bibles and forced Quran reading.
One prisoner now says he and his lawyers cannot obtain basic judicial documents. A prisoner’s wife seeking humanitarian access has been confronted by Azerbaijani media discussion of whether she could herself face imprisonment. Nearly 200 Armenians remain missing from the 2020 war. Medieval khachkars and 19th-century Armenian graves have been erased from Shushi.
Those are not peripheral details surrounding an otherwise completed peace. They are among the conditions by which the existence of peace should be measured.
