Armenia and Azerbaijan are committed to peacefully resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday in a statement on the 25th anniversary of a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement that stopped the Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
The agreement took effect on May 12, 1994 after being signed by the Armenian and Azerbaijani defense ministers and the commander of Karabakh’s Armenian-backed army. Hundreds of soldiers from both sides have been killed since then in ceasefire violations that have intensified in the last several years. But these periodic skirmishes along the “line of contact” around Karabakh and the Armenian-Azerbaijani border have not escalated into another all-out war so far.
“The May 12 agreement remains the basis for maintaining the ceasefire regime,” read the Russian Foreign Ministry statement.
The statement said that more “time is required” for the conflicting parties to reach a mutually acceptable peace deal. “We see the readiness of the parties to continue joint efforts at achieving a lasting peace,” it added, pointing to a recent series of high-level Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations.
The ministry said Moscow will carry on with its “active assistance” to the negotiating process within the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chaired by Russia, the United States and France.
Truce violations in the conflict zone have decreased significantly since Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met for the first time in September. Pashinian and Aliyev held more face-to-face talks in the following months, most recently in Vienna on March 29.
The foreign ministers of Armenia, Azerbaijan as well as Russia met in Moscow on April 15. Azerbaijan’s Elmar Mammadyarov said afterwards that they discussed, among other things, a 2016 Russian plant to resolve the Karabakh conflict. Russia’s Sergey Lavrov effectively confirmed this.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry insisted, however, that “no negotiations on any plan are underway at present.”
The Russian peace plan has still not been made public. Lavrov said only that it is in tune with the basic principles of a Karabakh settlement which have repeatedly been laid out by the U.S., Russian and French mediators in recent years.
In a March 9 statement, the mediators reiterated that “any fair and lasting settlement” must involve “return of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani control; an interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh providing guarantees for security and self-governance; a corridor linking Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh; future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh through a legally binding expression of will.”
Facebook Forum