Meeting with his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted that Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements brokered by Moscow “lay the foundation” for such a settlement.
“Time is running fast, events are developing rapidly,” Lavrov said at the start of the trilateral meeting held on the sidelines of a summit of ex-Soviet states. “In this regard, I think that today is a convenient occasion to talk about this topic and see what we can report to our leaders regarding the implementation of the agreements they signed.”
Those agreements stopped the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh and called for the restoration of transport links between Armenia and Azerbaijan and demarcation of their long border. Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov reportedly told Lavrov that their governments remain committed to implementing them.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly proposed that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian meet with him again in a trilateral format
“I am pleased to invited Azerbaijan’s president and Armenia’s prime minister,” Putin said in a speech during the Commonwealth of Independent States summit. “You can agree on a date. I understand that there is now interest in meeting in Russia.”
Aliyev and Pashinian met in Prague as recently as on October 6 for talks mediated by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Union chief Charles Michel. They are understood to have made major progress towards signing an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty by the end of this year.
The four leaders also agreed on the dispatch of an EU monitoring mission to Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan where at least 290 soldiers were killed last month in heavy fighting between the two sides. Armenian leaders have criticized Russia for what they see as a lack of support for Armenia shown during the two-day hostilities.
The Prague summit underscored the fact that the EU as well as the United States have been at the forefront of Armenia-Azerbaijan peace efforts in recent months and especially since the September border clashes.
Moscow has been very critical of the Western mediation, saying that the Western powers are trying to sideline Russia and use the Karabakh conflict in the geopolitical standoff over Ukraine.