President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan said that maps that show “Yerevan and Syunik” as part of Azerbaijan should be the basis for upcoming efforts to demarcate and delimit the borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

He said that the process of clarifying the borders with Armenia should be implemented on the basis of all the maps from 1918 and the ones that existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, adding that according to some of the maps from 1918 to 1920, Yerevan and Syunik were part of Azerbaijan.

Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan told Armenpress on Friday that Armenia was not afraid to study maps from different periods in history.

“We are not against the research of the maps,” said Mirzoyan. “But why consider only 20th century maps? We can start from the maps created in Babylon in the 6th century BC, or by Herodotus in the 5th century BC, or by Strabo in the 1st century BC, or created by Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, or from the maps created by Pliny the Elder in the same period, and then to continue with numerous Latin, Byzantine, Arabic and other geographical descriptions and maps of later periods.”

“However, being interested in the effective work of the forthcoming Commission on demarcation and border security, the Republic of Armenia believes that this process should be based on maps that are accepted by both sides and have legal standing,” added Mirzoyan.

On a related matter, Armenia’s National Security Chief Armen Grigoryan remarked on comments made by Aliyev’s assistant Hikmet Hajiyev who said that Baku’s expectation from Yerevan is the recognition of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Grigoryan told Armenpress on Friday that Azerbaijani officials must specify which territories they see as integral to Azerbaijan, in order for Armenia to specify its position.

“We have already stated that there is nothing unacceptable in the proposal of mutually recognizing each other’s territorial integrity by Armenia and Azerbaijan. We also said that Armenia and Azerbaijan recognized each other’s territorial integrity in the early 1990s,” said Grigoryan.

“The Nagorno-Karabakh issue is not a territorial issue for us, but an issue of security and rights for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. But some statements by a number of high-ranking Azerbaijani officials need to be clarified. In the context of these statements, we believe that the Azerbaijani officials should specify which territories they see in the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan so that Armenia could clarify its position,” added Grigoryan.

On Monday, Grigoryan and Hajiyev held a meeting in Brussels. The announcement of this meeting was made by the European Union’s Representative to the South Caucasus Toivo Klaar, who in a Twitter post welcomed the meeting. No further details were publicized about the meeting.