Baku and Yerevan have desire to continue the dialogue at the highest level on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Russian co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group Igor Popov told reporters Nov. 2, RIA Novosti reported.
“We hope that next month there will be a meeting of the foreign ministers of the two countries to discuss key settlement issues and confidence building measures that can be taken considering the development of the situation, taking into account how the relations between the leaders of the two countries will be built,” said Popov.
“Today our visit comes to an end, we were in Yerevan, in Nagorno-Karabakh, now we are in Baku,” he added. “We met with the acting prime minister of Armenia, the president of Azerbaijan, the defense ministers of the two countries. We will soon meet with the Azerbaijani foreign minister. The focus is on the issues related to the process of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict’s settlement.”
“In particular, we discussed the talks that took place among the leaders of the two countries in Dushanbe, the agreements that were reached and which are being implemented,” Popov said. “I mean the situation on the contact line, at the border, which has more or less stabilized. We also spoke about the communication line that has been established between Yerevan and Baku.”
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.
The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
trend.az