BISHKEK, October 13. /TASS/. Baku and Yerevan were often close to an agreement on Karabakh, they discussed a referendum, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a press conference summarizing his visit to Kyrgyzstan.

"I will not go into details, but I would like to say that we have been close to an agreement on Karabakh many times over the past decades," Putin said. "We agreed that a referendum should be held, but one side said it could not determine the date of this referendum, it was Azerbaijan, <...> the Armenian side, on the contrary, insisted on determining the date of the referendum, which would determine the status of Karabakh," Putin explained.

The head of state recalled that last year in Prague, the Armenian leadership closed this issue. "And said: 'Karabakh is a part of Azerbaijan'. The Armenian leadership even specified the number of square kilometers and referred to the 1991 agreement, when the state borders in the former Soviet republics were determined according to the borders formed in the Soviet Union," Putin explained.