Ilham Aliyev Receives Co-chairs of OSCE Minsk Group

The President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev received the Co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group Stefan Visconti, Igor Popov and Richard Hoagland and the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Andrzej Kasprzyk.

Details of the meeting are not reported. At present, the mediators are making efforts to force the parties to resume the negotiation process, which actually stopped 11 months ago after the April war in Karabakh.

Since then, on the line of contact, there have been several serious military clashes on various sectors of the front and the borders of the two countries, which resulted in deaths and injuries on both sides.

Over the past period, international mediators held a number of bilateral meetings with the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan with a view to developing common positions. However, judging by the aggressive statements from Baku and Yerevan, it has not yet been possible to find common ground between the parties.

Particularly active is Moscow. In particular, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held separate meetings with the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan in recent weeks. As a result of the talks, he acknowledged that there were 2-3 key issues on which the parties cannot come to a common opinion, therefore, it would be wrong to talk about an early settlement of the Karabakh conflict.  -02D-