Azerbaijan has its lands back - Lavrov

Baku/02.02.23/Turan: Azerbaijan has its territories back. The Russian Foreign Minister said this in an interview with "Russia 24" and the "RIA Novosti news agency" on 2 February.

Commenting on the probability of a CSTO mission being sent to the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Lavrov said the request came from Yerevan in September 2022, when there was "an explosion of violence and about 300 people were killed on both sides.

This plan was not implemented, as the Armenian side demanded at the Yerevan summit that the document "would categorically condemn the actions of Azerbaijan". However, CSTO members were "not ready" for this. Armenia has for years occupied seven districts around Karabakh, and Russia is desperate to resolve the issue politically. "Russia proposed options that the previous Armenian leadership did not accept, wanting to hold on to territories it had never claimed. Here, though, yes, Azerbaijan has returned the lands that belong to it," Lavrov said.

Lavrov further made it clear that Moscow does not know how to proceed, as Yerevan and Baku have agreed a document with the European Union on their readiness to conclude a peace treaty, taking into account the 1991 Alma Ata Declaration.

"It is somehow difficult for Moscow to decide on its next steps. Because the Alma Ata Declaration says that the borders between the new independent states will be the administrative borders of the Soviet Union, the Union Republics, including both the Armenian SSR and the Azerbaijan SSR, which included the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region." -02D-