UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called on Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve all remaining bilateral issues to normalize relations.

Guterres' office released the following statement on April 19.

"The Secretary-General has been closely following the normalization process between Armenia and Azerbaijan. He welcomes the agreement reached on 19 April between the respective State Commissions on the delimitation of the state border between Armenia and Azerbaijan and encourages the parties to continue the delimitation and demarcation of the remaining sections of the border and tackle all outstanding bilateral issues toward achieving full normalization of relations."

On April 19, the deputy prime ministers of Armenian and Azerbaijan, who head committees tasked with overseeing the border delimitation process, announced that they had reached a preliminary deal to begin by including four villages in Armenia’s northeastern Tavush province and four abandoned villages that used to be part of Azerbaijan’s northwestern Qazakh district during the Soviet era.

Armenia took control of the four abandoned villages in the early 1990s.

Photo: Eskinder Debebe / United Nations Photo