BERLIN

The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia will hold peace talks in Germany's capital Berlin on Wednesday.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will host Azerbaijan's Jeyhun Bayramov and Armenia's Ararat Mirzoyan in the guest house of the German Foreign Ministry, Villa Borsig.

Baerbock will separately meet with the ministers ahead of a trilateral meeting, where she is expected to give a statement at the beginning of the negotiations.

During a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz earlier this month, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan decided to restart the process on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions, including Kalbajar.

Azerbaijan liberated most of the region during the war in the fall of 2020, which ended with a Russian-brokered peace agreement, opening the door to normalization.

Baku initiated an anti-terrorism operation in Karabakh last September to establish constitutional order after which illegal separatist forces in the region surrendered.

*Writing by Diyar Guldogan in Washington, DC.