Epress.am News from Armenia
The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, meeting with their Russian counterpart in Kazan on Friday, failed to agree on a framework document which would have set the stage for a resolution of the Nagorno-Karbakh conflict.
After talks that lasted nearly 4 hours, the three presidents, Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia, Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, issued a joint statement in which they said that they recorded progress in the road to settling the two-decade conflict.
“The heads of state confirmed reaching a mutual understanding on a range of issues whose resolution will help create conditions for an approval of the Basic Principles,” read the statement, in part.
The statement notes that the parties reviewed the work carried out in order to harmonize the draft guidelines.
“The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan expressed their appreciation to the leader of Russia, the US and France, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries, for their constant attention to the problem of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. They highly appreciated the personal efforts of the president of the Russian Federation to help achieve the agreements,” concluded the statement.
Note, the mini-summit at Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia, was the 9th trilateral meeting since 2008 and the second one this year. The last time the leaders of the three countries met was in the Russian city of Sochi on Mar. 5.
The disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan after a bloody war in the 1990s and is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians. Today it exists as a de-facto independent state under an uneasy ceasefire, and OSCE-brokered efforts to resolve its status have so far been unsuccessful.