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Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

Delegations at Vienna meeting on Karabakh are working on final statement — source

VIENNA, May 16 /TASS/. The presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia are trying to work out the final statement through mediation of the co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group, a source at one of the delegations told TASS on Monday. According to him, it should strengthen the determination to reach the conflict’s political settlement in the region.

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

"It’s not going to be easy," the source said. "This is the first meeting between [Azerbaijani President] Ilham Aliyev and [Armenian President] Serzh Sargsyan after the recent escalation of tensions in Nagorno-Karabak. We will see how the dialogue will go," the interlocutor said.

Earlier, the co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group - the ambassadors of Russia, the United States and France Igor Popov; James Warlick and Pierre Andrieu - noted three aspects of the Karabakh problem as they called the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia: truce consolidation; the strengthening of trust and coordination of peaceful settlement principles.

The sides have not yet succeeded in getting down directly to the settlement talks. The OSCE said that the sides should work out the principles, which were still to be agreed, for the talks to start.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during his visit to the Armenian capital Yerevan late in April that such principles should not be declarative. "I think that if we made some slight progress in the political process; if we defined the general principles, which the sides could regard as the basis for working out legally binding principles, that would have, certainly, played a vital role in starting the talks and would have turned into a vital factor preventing a new outbreak of violence," Lavrov said.

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Armenia Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh

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