The Armenian and Azerbaijani state commissions agree the first delimited section of their border, roughly a dozen kilometres in the Tavush direction, and Armenia transfers control of four villages held since the 1990s. The commissions record the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration and the Soviet-era administrative maps in force at the time as the baseline for the work. Protests follow in the affected communities and in Yerevan.
Why it mattersThe only completed border work in the entire process, and therefore the only evidence that the mechanism functions at all. It established three things the module measures everything since against: that a legal baseline both states accept exists; that delimitation — agreeing a line on a map — proceeds section by section rather than comprehensively; and that its domestic cost in Armenia is immediate, because the baseline consistently applied moves territory away from Armenian control as well as toward it. Delimitation is not demarcation, and no section has been physically marked on the strength of it.
Confidence: HighSources: Official government statements · Reuters · RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty) · International Crisis GroupMethodologyCorrections