Armenia & Azerbaijan Reach Historic Treaty to End 40-Year Conflict. Armenian and Azerbaijani officials said Thursday they had agreed on the text of a peace treaty to end the nearly four-decade conflict between the South Caucasus countries, a sudden breakthrough in a tense and often bitter peace process.

The two post-Soviet countries have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan then largely populated by ethnic Armenians, seceded from Azerbaijan with the support of Armenia.

Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday that it had finalized a draft of a peace treaty with Azerbaijan.

“The peace treaty is ready for signing. The Republic of Armenia is ready to begin consultations with the Republic of Azerbaijan on the date and place of signing the treaty,” the Armenian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a statement: “We note with satisfaction that negotiations on the text of the draft peace treaty and the establishment of interstate relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been completed.”

However, the timeline for signing the agreement is uncertain as Azerbaijan has said that a condition for its signing is changes to Armenia’s constitution, which it says makes implicit claims to its territory.

Armenia denies such claims but Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly said in recent months that the country’s founding document needs to be changed and has called for a referendum to do so. No date has been set.

The hostilities, which began in the late 1980s, have led to the mass expulsion of millions of Muslim Azeris and Armenians, the majority of whom are Christians, from Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan began peace talks in September 2023 after retaking Karabakh by force, forcing nearly all of the region’s 100,000 Armenians to flee to Armenia.

Both sides have said they want to sign a deal to end the long-running conflict, but progress has been slow and relations are tense.

Their 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) shared border is closed and heavily militarized.

In January, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused Armenia of creating a “fascist” threat that needed to be destroyed, in comments the Armenian leader described as a possible attempt to justify the fresh conflict.