September 27, 2023

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QUESTION: And I have a few topics but let me start with Azerbaijan-Armenia, if you don’t mind. As I understand, senior officials are currently in Azerbaijan. You have eyes and ears on the ground. Give me a sense of what you have been observing there during the past 24 hours. There are calls for international community to prevent ethnic cleansing, something that (inaudible). What exactly is going on? And the sides are talking about also turning back to Brussels. What is being hoped for, actually?

MR MILLER: So I would say a few things. Number one, as you noted, Samantha Power, the USAID administrator, and Acting Assistant Secretary Yuri Kim are in Azerbaijan today, where they stressed a number of things, the same things that the Secretary stressed in his conversation with President Aliyev yesterday and that I reiterated at the podium, which is that, number one, we want to see the ceasefire maintained; number two, we want to see humanitarian needs addressed; that means keeping the Lachin corridor open, it means ensuring that humanitarian supplies can come in, and that it means an international monitoring mission to ensure that humanitarian needs are addressed.

And I will say that we did welcome the comments by the Government of Azerbaijan just a little while ago before I came out to this podium, that they would welcome such an international monitoring mission. That’s something that the Secretary had directly pushed the president for, and we’re glad to see his having agreed to it, and we will work with our allies and partners in the coming days to flesh out exactly what that mission will look like. But then ultimately what we do want to see is a return to the negotiating table, where they can ultimately reach a dignified, lasting peace.

QUESTION: Speaking of the negotiating table, for months and months you had dialogue going on in Washington, in Brussels. Senior officials told us just last month that the sides had agreed to return back to Washington. Who dropped the ball, and when and why?

MR MILLER: I don’t know what – so first of all, I reject the characterization about dropping the ball. We have been pursuing negotiations. The Secretary has been having direct conversations with the president of Azerbaijan, the prime minister of Armenia. We’ve had a number of officials travel to the region – not just in the past week or 10 days since hostilities broke out but going back months and months and months.

We have done everything we can to pursue diplomacy, but ultimately, remember, it’s up to the two parties here who are the parties that have direct disagreements. We can do everything we can to push them but ultimately they have to agree to talk and they have to agree to ultimately come to some resolution. That’s what we’re going to do, is continue to play our part to facilitate that.

QUESTION: And how much of this also can be pointed at Russia? I’m asking because Kremlin loves pointing at the West, and also the fact that Pashinyan chose Western orientation for Armenia. So what is Russia’s role here, and how do you – is it time to come out and call Russia out for what it has been doing?

MR MILLER: I certainly do not think Russia has played a productive role here in the past week. We have seen them at times – there have been times where they facilitated negotiations, and that was something that we welcomed; but certainly in the last week their role has not been productive in this situation.

QUESTION: I have one more on Russia, if you don’t mind.

MR MILLER: Yeah.

QUESTION: In the wake of today’s sanctions and also yesterday’s business advisory on Xinjiang, I want to ask you about business advisory on Russia. It has been more than a year and a half that we entered this war. There have been calls from different sides, Ukrainian business community and diaspora. The fact that you guys are still allowing the U.S. companies, business companies, to operate in Russia – some of them have left and returned back and earning money and pay taxes – is not consistent with your policy to isolate Russia, is it?

MR MILLER: Let me say a few things about that. Number one, that since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February of last year, a number of U.S. international companies have looked at the legal, looked at the reputational risk, and decided that those risks were too high to continue involving – to continue operating in Russia. In fact, over a thousand U.S. companies have withdrawn from Russia in that time. In addition, Russia has passed restrictive new laws that I think have discouraged a number of businesses from operating.

I will say this is a decision that every business has to make on its own, looking at the operational and legal and reputational risks of operating in Russia. But I do want to be clear that we have always emphasized that there are certain types of commercial activity that we are not trying to shut down with respect to Russia. All of our sanctions have had exemptions for food, for medicine, for other humanitarian purposes because we do not see the United States in conflict with the Russian people.

So we have not tried to tell businesses that are working to provide food or pharmaceutical goods to the Russian people that they should stop doing business there. We have targeted our sanctions, our export controls, on the sectors of the Russian economy that fuel Russia’s war machine, and we’ll continue to do that.

QUESTION: Can I follow up one more on Armenia-Azerbaijan?

MR MILLER: Yeah.

QUESTION: One other development is that Azerbaijan says it’s arrested the head of the self-styled republican – the suffragist entity in Nagorno-Karabakh, which of course has fallen on Mr. Vardanian. Does the U.S. have anything to say about that, either the arrest or about what treatment you would expect to —

MR MILLER: We are aware of the arrest. We’re closely monitoring the situation. I don’t have any further comment today.

For more information: www.state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-september-27-2023/