BAKU: Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said on Tuesday a peace deal with Armenia was closer than ever before, as teams from both countries began demarcating the border in a bid to end decades of territorial disputes and clashes.

Aliyev’s optimism comes amid progress on marking the border despite protests in Armenia, still bruised after Baku seized control of the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region in a lightning offensive last year.

On Tuesday, teams from both countries installed the first border marker after officials had agreed to delimit a section based on Soviet-era maps.

“We are close as never before,” Aliyev said on Tuesday of an elusive peace deal. “We now have a common understanding of how the peace agreement should look like. We only need to address details,” he said.

“Both sides need time... We both have political will to do it.” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan last month agreed to return four border villages that were part of Azerbaijan when the two countries were republics of the Soviet Union.