Epress.am News from Armenia
The presidents of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia may sign a specific document on Karabakh at their forthcoming Jun. 25 meeting in Kazan, an Azeri official has said, reports News.az, citing Interfax-Azerbaijan and APA as sources.
“The presidents will possibly sign a protocol or another document, but right now I cannot say anything,” Novruz Mammadov, head of the foreign relations department at the Azerbaijani Presidential Administration, told journalists on Tuesday.
The summit in Kazan will be the ninth trilateral meeting of the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Russian presidents. They last met in Sochi on Mar. 5, where they issued a joint statement pledging to take further confidence-building measures, including the exchange of prisoners of war. Declarations of some kind are often adopted at these summits.
Novruz Mammadov said that recently there had been a lot of positive signals about the Kazan meeting, including a joint statement on Karabakh adopted by the presidents of Russia, the United States and France during the G8 summit in Deauville.
“Both the international community and the countries co-chairing the OSCE Minsk Group want a change in the status quo in the region. We also want progress in this regard; that is, we want specific districts [of Azerbaijan] to be freed and internally displaced persons to return to their homes,” Mammadov said.
“In order to justify these hopes, the Armenian president should demonstrate political will and express his position. The Armenian side is trying to protract the process of negotiations on various pretexts. This is a non-constructive step,” Mammadov continued.
Asked about the timing of a vote to determine the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh, he said determination of the status of this region would be the final stage in the settlement process, so it would be wrong to talk about it at this point.