Today, a meeting was held between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, on the eve of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit.
In diplomacy, sometimes people look at who is sitting at the table before the documents on the table. At the Bishkek meeting, the selected individuals next to the leaders are not random officials. Each of them represents a specific direction of the Azerbaijan-Armenia negotiations.
Modern.az reports that on the Azerbaijani side, Deputy Prime Minister Shahin Mustafayev, Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov, and Assistant to the President, Head of the Foreign Policy Affairs Department of the Presidential Administration Hikmet Hajiyev participated in the meeting. The Armenian delegation included Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan, and Secretary of the Security Council Alen Simonyan.
Thus, three main lines appear on both sides of the table: border and communications, peace document and diplomacy, security and strategic coordination.
Shahin Mustafayev and Mher Grigoryan have known each other from the negotiating table for a long time. They lead the commissions on the delimitation of the state border between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The joint work of these two officials is already more about maps, specific border areas, legal documents, and technical agreements than general political statements.
Nikol Pashinyan also confirmed in one of his previous statements that these two Deputy Prime Ministers manage the commissions.
The presence of Sh. Mustafayev and Grigoryan at the Bishkek table shows the importance of topics such as border delimitation, work on subsequent areas, transport communications, and the establishment of economic ties in the process.
The second line of the table was represented by Jeyhun Bayramov and Ararat Mirzoyan.
The Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia are the main diplomatic figures in the peace agreement negotiations. The task of agreeing on disputed phrases, selecting legal terms, and transforming the positions of the parties into an official document falls on the teams they lead.
On August 8, 2025, the agreed text of the “Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and Interstate Relations” between Azerbaijan and Armenia was initialed by Jeyhun Bayramov and Ararat Mirzoyan in Washington.
At that meeting, the foreign ministers also signed a joint appeal for the closure of the OSCE Minsk Process and related structures.
The participation of the ministers indicates that the legal and diplomatic agenda is still one of the main pillars of the process. Issues such as the signing of the agreement, subsequent ratification procedures, and the establishment of diplomatic relations are the direct work of foreign policy institutions.
Alen Simonyan's participation in the Bishkek meeting attracts special attention. He was appointed Secretary of the Security Council on August 13 – just 18 days before the meeting between Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan. Before that, he was the Speaker of the Armenian Parliament for five years.
When Pashinyan introduced Simonyan to the Security Council collective, he stated that he had also participated in making important and strategic decisions for Armenia in the previous period. In this regard, Simonyan's sitting next to Pashinyan in one of the first important regional negotiations in his new position does not seem accidental.
The duties of Hikmet Hajiyev and Alen Simonyan are not formally the same. However, both represent the close political circle of the leaders and the line of strategic coordination of decisions. Their presence at the table indicates that not only the peace document but also security issues and political implementation mechanisms of the agreements reached are important at the meeting.
