The presidents of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia may sign some kind of document on Karabakh at their 25 June summit, an Azeri official has said.
"The presidents will possibly sign a protocol or another document, but right now I cannot say anything," Novruz Mammadov, head of the foreign relations department at the Azerbaijani Presidential Administration, told journalists on Tuesday.
The summit in Kazan will be the ninth trilateral meeting of the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Russian presidents. They last met in Sochi on 5 March, where they issued a joint statement pledging to take further confidence-building measures, including the exchange of prisoners of war. Declarations of some kind are often adopted at these summits.
Novruz Mammadov said that recently there had been a lot of positive signals about the Kazan meeting, including a joint statement on Karabakh adopted by the presidents of Russia, the United States and France during the G8 summit in Deauville.
"Both the international community and the countries co-chairing the OSCE Minsk Group want a change in the status quo in the region. We also want progress in this regard, that is, we want specific districts [of Azerbaijan] to be freed and internally displaced persons to return to their homes," Mammadov said.
"I believe that the Armenian side must find the courage to express its attitude towards these issues," he stressed.
“In order to justify these hopes, the Armenian president should demonstrate political will and express his position. The Armenian side is trying to protract the process of negotiations on various pretexts. This is a non-constructive step,” Mammadov continued.
Asked about the timing of a vote to determine the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh, the official said determination of the status of this region would be the final stage in the settlement process, so it would be wrong to talk about it at this point.
The conflict between Baku and Yerevan erupted in the late 1980s with Armenia’s territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war which lasted until May 1994, Armenia occupied not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also seven Azerbaijani districts around it.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are negotiating to resolve the conflict through the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs- Russia, France and the USA.
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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