Armenia, Azerbaijan leaders to meet next month

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will hold a pre-arranged meeting in Spain next month despite Baku’s lightning offensive against Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh, Yerevan said on Sunday. The talks on 5 October in Grenada will include French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and European Council chief Charles Michel, the Armenian Security Council said in a statement, adding that officials will meet to prepare the talks next week. France, Germany and the European Union have been key players in attempts to resolve the decades-long conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. The ethnically Armenian region is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but has been run by a separatist administration for three decades. The rebels agreed to disarm under the terms of a ceasefire reached on Wednesday. Pashinyan and Aliyev last met in July in Brussels.