CIS Executive Secretary Sergey Lebedev has written to the Armenian foreign minister to deny reports of remarks he made in Azerbaijan.
“I would like to inform you officially that the following statement 'We are discussing the liberation of the occupied territories, creating a corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, Karabakh and Armenia' quoted by several news agencies is untrue," Lebedev wrote to Edward Nalbandian.
"I would like to assure you of my sincere and constructive stance on close collaboration with the Armenian leadership in the interests of the further strengthening of the Commonwealth of Independent States,” the CIS secretary wrote to the Armenian foreign minister.
Azerbaijani news agencies are standing by their reports of Sergey Lebedev's remarks, however. His comments to journalists, made on the sidelines of an international forum at Baku's Slavic University on 9 November, were recorded on dictaphone and have been made available on the website 1news.az.
He can be clearly heard saying in Russian: "You can see yourselves the effort that the Russian leadership is putting into resolving this conflict. Trilateral meetings have begun. They have been going on for almost two years now. The last meeting took place in Astrakhan. You know that specific agreements were reached on an exchange of prisoners and bodies and so on. This is only a small, small step but we are doing our utmost to ensure that other steps follow this one, that agreement be reached - and this issue is being discussed too, about the liberation of the occupied territories and about the creation of corridors between Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan, and Karabakh and Armenia respectively, and so on, and also many other humanitarian issues are being discussed. I know this."
Armenian media, including News.am, cast doubt on the reports, saying that Lebedev could not have said in Baku that the liberation of occupied territories was being discussed at Russia's initiative.
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