At a meeting in Moscow, attended by the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Putin said: “Despite all the difficulties and all the problems that still exist, the situation is moving towards a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”
“We have now agreed that in the near future, within a week, the deputy prime ministers of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia will meet and the outstanding issues will be resolved,” the agency said. Russian press “Sputnik”, quoting Putin.
On Thursday, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan announced progress towards normalizing relations between the two adversaries, with the start of talks between them in Moscow.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met separately with the Russian president ahead of the launch of trilateral talks with Russian participation on Thursday evening.
The talks come in the wake of bloody border clashes between the two neighboring countries, which are locked in a decades-old dispute over control of the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“There is a possibility of reaching a peace agreement. Azerbaijan has no territorial claims in Armenia,” Aliyev said before the talks began.
For his part, Pashinyan said that the two countries are “making good progress in normalizing relations on the basis of mutual recognition of territorial sovereignty”, adding that Yerevan is ready to “open all transport lines to Armenia”.
The two former Soviet republics fought two wars, the first in the early 1990s and the second in 2020, to control the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which unilaterally split from Azerbaijan three decades ago.
After a blitzkrieg in which Baku took control of land in the region in the fall of 2020, Baku and Yerevan signed a ceasefire mediated by Moscow, but the border areas between the two countries are still experiencing frequent skirmishes.
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