Contrary to expectations, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan did not even meet at Astana. An Armenian diplomatic source, who asked not to be identified, told RFE\/RL\u2019s Armenian service that the Azerbaijani leader cancelled his planned talks with Sargysan and Medvedev \u201cat the last minute.\u201d <\/p>\n
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The source claimed that Aliyev did so because of \u201cglaring contradictions\u201d between the text of the five-party statement and his speech at the summit delivered later in the day.<\/p>\n
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In that speech, Aliyev lashed out at Armenia, again stating that it is seeking to prolong the Karabakh status quo and to turn peace talks organized by the Minsk Group Co-Chairs into a \u201cmeaningless process.\u201d He also accused the Armenians of committing \u201cwar crimes and a genocide\u201d against Karabakh\u2019s Azerbaijani population during the 1991-1994 war.<\/p>\n
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Recall that no peace deal was reached at the Dec. 1\u20132 OSCE Summit. The two countries’ leaders only issued a joint statement that was also signed by the heads of the US, Russian and French delegations at the summit. It said Presidents Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev \u201creaffirmed their commitment\u201d to seek a peaceful settlement based on international law and \u201cbasic principles\u201d advocated by the three mediating powers, reports RFE\/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun Radio). <\/p>\n
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According to the statement, the signatories \u201cagreed that the time has come for more decisive efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.\u201d \u201cThey further agreed that a peaceful, negotiated settlement will bring stability and security and is the only way to bring real reconciliation to the peoples of the region,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Contrary to expectations, Azerbaijan’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[615,13192,10665,16909,12556],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49845"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}