Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan met a second time yesterday in Sochi.
They discussed the current stage in the process to settle the conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and the prospects for the future.
The meeting was also attended by Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov, Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian, the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, mediating a settlement to the conflict — Robert Bradtke of the USA, Bernard Fassier of France and Yury Merzlyakov of Russia — and Andrzej Kasprzyk, the personal representative of the OSCE chairman-in-office.
The meeting took place at Sochi’s Adler international airport. Earlier in the day, the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents had a meeting in Sochi with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The foreign ministers of the three countries later joined those talks.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said afterwards that Azerbaijan and Armenia had agreed to prepare their own proposals on the contentious parts of an agreement to the conflict.
The OSCE mediators hope that Yerevan and Baku will submit their proposals within the next two weeks, Russia’s Minsk Group co-chair Yury Merzlyakov said after the second round of talks yesterday.
Once the proposals have been submitted, the co-chairs will visit the region again, Merzlyakov said.
He described the talks as open and constructive and said that the trilateral meeting of the Azerbaijani, Armenian and Russian presidents had been important.
“The sides greatly respect the Russian president’s initiative,” Merzlyakov said.
He declined, however, to predict whether a peace agreement would be signed in 2010.
The agreement on which Azerbaijan and Armenia are to make their proposals is an updated version of the Basic Principles of a settlement proposed by the OSCE mediators in Madrid in 2007.
The Russian foreign minister said yesterday that the sides had reached “a common understanding on the preamble of the document,” which implies that much remains to be agreed.
The Basic Principles as formulated earlier include the return of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani control, an interim status for Karabakh providing guarantees for security and self-governance, and the future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh through a legally binding expression of will.
The status of Karabakh is thought to be the key sticking point in the negotiations. Azerbaijan insists that Karabakh should remain within Azerbaijan, as is recognized by international law, while Armenia wants a different status for the territory.
Azerbaijani presidential official Novruz Mammadov said in December that little had changed in the updated version of the Basic Principles.
