Azerbaijan now wants to achieve two goals, and one has already been achieved - the checkpoint. It is not formalized, but in reality there are people standing in the Lachin corridor, who have to be asked if people and cargo can pass through. Baku only wants to formalize it, Director of the Caucasus Institute Alexander Iskandaryan told NEWS.am on the Power Factor.

Baku's second immediate goal is a peace treaty where the Karabakh issue would be spelled out as an internal task for Azerbaijan. It is a step towards the withdrawal of peacekeepers, because if Karabakh is an internal matter, why do we need peacekeepers, he added.

The expert noted that Azerbaijan has a whole bouquet of goals in general, and Karabakh without Armenians is the general goal.

There is also a goal of the so-called Zangezur corridor, the territory of Armenia itself. Therefore, even if they open the Lachin corridor, the strategy of pressure on the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will not disappear. Aliyev is probing red lines, testing Russia for weakness. This is also a conflict between Moscow and Baku. The negotiation process between them is rather intense, and it is very closed, he said.

Iskandaryan said that Azerbaijan wants Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians, and this can be seen from many of Azerbaijan's actions. "And this is absolutely clear to Karabakhis. There are no Armenians left in the territories that Azerbaijan occupied as a result of the 2020 war, and there were 38,000 of them there before the war. Aliyev is against Armenians in principle, he has repeatedly said so. Besides, there is a law in Azerbaijan according to which Armenians of any citizenship have no possibility to enter the country, he stressed.