Turkish diplomats and politicians will today be closely following a trilateral summit in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, where Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will host Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at a trilateral summit that will focus on resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.
Ankara, which last year agreed with Yerevan to establish diplomatic relations and reopen their border, insists on seeing improvement towards a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in parallel with its efforts to normalize relations with Yerevan. Ankara argues that partial normalization in the Caucasus cannot be sustainable as long as the parties fail to exert efforts for complete normalization.
Three co-chairs of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) -- France, Russia and the United States -- met with Aliyev in Baku on Thursday and with Sarksyan in Yerevan on Wednesday. President Sarksyan was given an updated version of the 2007 Madrid document, which includes the latest changes of the conflict settlement’s basic principles. The same document was given to the Azerbaijani president in December 2009.
“I want to say that Aliyev highly appreciates Russia’s role in this process, and we expect progress [in talks would be reached] to resolve the problem, including at the upcoming meeting in Sochi,” Sergei Naryshkin, head of the administration of the Russian president, was quoted as saying on Saturday after talks with Aliyev during a working visit to Baku.
Yet, Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian, speaking at a press conference in Yerevan on Thursday, has already downplayed expectations, saying he didn’t expect a turning point in the negotiations over the solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2010.
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