Hikmat Hajiyev calls Armenia’s security council secretary during briefing

A notable diplomatic incident took place on the sidelines of the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17) in Yerevan. Armenian Security Council Secretary Alen Simonyan was briefing local and foreign journalists when his mobile phone rang.

Operative Information Center-OMM reports that as Simonyan was speaking to the media about the ongoing peace and normalization process between Yerevan and Baku, he showed his phone screen to the cameras and said the caller was Hikmat Hajiyev, assistant to the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and head of the Foreign Policy Affairs Department of the Presidential Administration.

Simonyan did not answer the call in front of the cameras. “By the way, the person calling right now is him [Hikmat Hajiyev]. I’ll finish the briefing for the press and call him back immediately,” he told journalists.

Simonyan has previously said that he maintains direct and оператив contact channels with Azerbaijani presidential aide Hikmat Hajiyev, and that they regularly speak by phone to address important issues on the bilateral agenda. Direct communication between officials is one channel used to discuss matters related to the peace and normalization process between Azerbaijan and Armenia.