Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has harshly criticized Armenian policy on Karabakh in his address to the OSCE summit in Astana.
Azerbaijan has the impression that Armenia wants to maintain the status quo on Karabakh, he told the summit's plenary session.
"Instead of conducting talks in an atmosphere of good will and in the interest of finding a resolution of the conflict in the near future, Armenia prefers to follow a path of escalating the conflict with unpredictable consequences," President Aliyev said, according to Interfax-Azerbaijan.
Armenia "constantly breaks the ceasefire regime, conducts military exercises in the occupied territories, tries to change the historic names of occupied towns and villages, illegally resettles the civilian population in the occupied territory, all in an attempt to make the situation irreversible and the peace process pointless", the Azerbaijani leader continued in a hard-hitting speech.
"Armenia's behaviour during negotiations gives us the impression that Armenia does not seek peace, does not seek the liberation of the occupied territories and most probably wants to maintain the status quo for a long time and to render the talks process pointless," Aliyev said.
The OSCE is the body mediating a settlement to the Karabakh conflict through its Minsk Group, co-chaired by France, Russia and the USA.
"The OSCE Minsk Group was created in 1992. Talks have been held within its framework for nearly 20 years but without result," Ilham Aliyev told the summit.
"We are ready to continue talks and come to completion in the shortest possible time and also to reach a result that will be based on the norms and principles of international law as part of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan," he said.
The remarks pretty much put an end to hopes that the Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders might make progress at the summit on a Karabakh settlement.
Diplomatic sources in Astana are reporting that the two presidents will not, after all, meet at the summit, according to ANS TV's correspondent in the Kazakh capital.
The three Minsk Group co-chairs and Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev in particular held many rounds of talks with the sides in the run-up to the summit.
The outlook was already not good earlier in the day on Wednesday. The heads of delegation of the three OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries and the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents said in a statement that they had agreed "that the time has come for more decisive efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict", not quite the breakthrough that some had been hoping for.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims on the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenian armed forces occupied a swathe of Azerbaijani territory from 1992, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994 but no long-term peace agreement has been reached.
The nub of the conflict remains unresolved - the competing claims of territorial integrity, which Azerbaijan insists takes precedence in the case of Karabakh, and self-determination, which Armenia wants to see for the Armenians of Karabakh.
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