Baku - (AFP) - Azerbaijan announced on Friday that it had canceled a session of peace talks with Armenia that was scheduled to take place in Brussels because Yerevan insists on the participation of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan have been poisoned for more than 30 years due to regional conflicts that led to two wars and heavy humanitarian losses, with tens of thousands of lives. Baku accuses Paris of being biased towards Armenia.

Peace talks began several months ago between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who were supposed to meet on December 7 in Brussels.

On Friday, Aliyev said during an international conference in Baku that Pashinyan "agreed to this meeting, provided that French President Macron is present."

Moscow, which considers the Caucasus as its sphere of influence, does not view with satisfaction the European mediation between Baku and Yerevan, and suspects that the West intends to compete with it in this region while it is preoccupied with invading Ukraine.

When asked Friday by journalists about Aliyev's cancellation of the scheduled meeting in Brussels, the Kremlin confirmed Russia's readiness to host the talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Armenia, an ally of Russia and Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, has fought two wars over the past three decades to control Nagorno-Karabakh.

The war in 2020 killed more than 6,500 soldiers and ended with a ceasefire sponsored by Russia. Armenia ceded territories it had controlled for decades, and Moscow deployed about 2,000 Russian soldiers to monitor this fragile truce.

And in September, at least 286 people were killed in clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in the worst confrontations between the two neighboring countries located in the Caucasus since the 2020 war.