MOSCOW, September 25. /TASS/. Moscow hopes that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s meetings with foreign leaders, including with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will help ensure security and normalize life in Nagorno-Karabakh, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
"Each time we hope that all meetings the Azerbaijani president holds, including with the president of Turkey, will help ensure security in the region and normalize the situation in Karabakh after what has happened," he told journalists when asked about expectations for today’s meeting between Aliyev and Erdogan.
"These are sovereign countries and they are exercising their sovereign right to develop cooperative relations; we know that Baku and Ankara have very close relations," Peskov said, adding that Moscow has "relations that are no less close with both Ankara and Baku."
The Turkish presidential office said earlier that Erdogan and Aliyev will take part in the groundbreaking ceremony for the Ygdir-Nakhichevan gas pipeline on September 25. Talks between the two leaders are expected to focus on bilateral relations, as well as on pressing regional and global problems, including the recent developments in Nagorno-Karabakh.
On September 19, tensions flared up again in Nagorno-Karabakh. Baku announced it was launching what it described as "local anti-terrorist measures" and demanded the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the region. Yerevan, in turn, said there were no Armenian forces in Karabakh, calling what was happening "an act of large-scale aggression." Russia called on the parties to end the bloodshed and return to efforts to resolve the issue diplomatically. On September 20, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry announced that an agreement on the suspension of the anti-terrorist measures in Karabakh had been reached through the mediation of Russia’s peacekeeping mission.