Earlier in the week, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aykhan Hajizada said that Yerevan "is not interested" in peace and stability in the region since it refused to agree to a peace proposal that would include provisions ruling out Armenia's territorial claims against Azerbaijan.
"The assessment of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia is clear: with its aggressive discourse and actions Azerbaijan makes preparations for subjecting the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to genocide and for a new aggression against Armenia," the ministry said in a statement.
The Armenian foreign ministry added that Baku was "doing everything" to make peace in the region impossible.
The decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh on the border between the two countries flared up again in September 2020, marking the worst escalation since the 1990s. Hostilities ended with a Russia-brokered trilateral declaration of ceasefire signed in November 2020. The two former Soviet countries agreed to the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in the region. Occasional clashes have since occurred on the border.
Since December 2022, the Lachin Corridor — a road which runs through Azerbaijani territory and serves as the only link between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh — has been blocked by a group of people from Azerbaijan described by Baku as environmental activists protesting alleged illegal Armenian mining in the area.
On February 18, 2023, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held peace talks in Munich. Following the negotiations, Aliyev said that the main issue was that the peace treaty between the two countries should be drawn up on the basis of international norms and principles, and that any provisions on Nagorno-Karabakh were unacceptable.