Armenia and Azerbaijan have accused each other of blocking the meeting proposed with the mediation of Great Britain between their leaders, reports "Reuters", quoted by News.bg.
This is another stumbling block on the road to the peace process aimed at ending their more than three-decade conflict.
Both Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev are in the UK for a European Political Community summit at Blenheim Palace, near Oxford.
Hikmet Hadjiev, a foreign policy adviser to President Aliyev, said that Armenia rejected the proposal for the two leaders to attend a joint meeting brokered by London.
"We view Pashinyan's refusal to meet in London as his intention to withdraw from the peace agenda," he pointed out.
Shortly afterwards, Armenia's Foreign Ministry reported that Yerevan had offered Azerbaijan a bilateral meeting in the UK, but that Baku had declined the invitation. The agency notes that the meeting proposal remains in effect.
Pashinyan and Aliyev last met in Berlin in February, and the then meeting was held with the mediation of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have repeatedly said they want to sign a peace treaty to end the conflict over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh enjoyed de facto independence from Baku for more than three decades until September 2023, when, in a lightning offensive, Azerbaijan retook the territory and expelled some 100,000 Armenians.
The two countries have since continued peace talks aimed at demarcating their shared 1,000 km border, which remains closed and heavily militarized.
In May, Armenia returned to Baku four abandoned Azerbaijani villages it had controlled since the early 1990s. The fate of several more villages located on small enclaves of land surrounded by the other side's territory remains unclear.
In addition, Azerbaijan, whose population is several times that of its long-time rival, is demanding that Armenia change its constitution and remove the indirect reference to Nagorno-Karabakh independence as part of the peace process.