Foreign affairs ministers of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia discussed Nagorny Karabakh situation

Sergey Lavrov, minister of foreign affairs of Russia, spoke positively on of the outcomes of the meeting with his colleagues from Azerbaijan and Armenia, who came to Moscow to discuss the Nagorny Karabakh settlement. According to the head of Russian foreign affairs, "the meeting was fruitful."

The trilateral meeting in the Smolensk Square was attended by the ministers of foreign affairs of Azerbaijan and Armenia Elmar Mamedyarov and Vartan Oskanian. "The choice of Moscow to be the venue of the trilateral meeting was not accidental, since Russia has historically played тan important role in Transcaucasia, in particular, in resolving the Nagorny Karabakh problem," a diplomatic source in Moscow noted. He said that "the main topic of the meeting in this format was to search ways to settle the Karabakh conflict," the ITAR-TASS reports.

An agreement to hold the meeting was achieved in the course of a visit on October 2-4 to the region of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict of the co-chairs of the Minsk OSCE Group Yuri Merzliakov (Russia), Mathew Bryse (USA) and Bernard Fassier (France).

We remind you that the previous talks of Mamedyarov and Oskanian on peaceful settlement of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict took place on June 13, 2006, in Paris.

In the course of the talks, the parties discussed the principles and approaches, where they have disagreements, and reached an agreement to go on with the negotiations aimed at bringing their positions closer.

Merzliakov did not rule out another meeting of the ministers with participation of the MG OSCE co-chairs in about a week.

"After that meeting, we'll be able to state when and where presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan Robert Kocharian and Ilkham Aliev will meet," Merzliakov noted.