A senior Armenian diplomat sounded pessimistic on Thursday about prospects for the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict ahead of a planned meeting of Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s presidents.
The U.S., Russian and French mediators said after their latest visits to Yerevan and Baku over the weekend that Presidents Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliyev agreed to resume their face-to-face peace talks soon. The three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group said they discussed with them “possible topics” that will be on the agenda of the “forthcoming summit.”
Aliyev and Sarkisian did not meet on the sidelines of a summit of ex-Soviet states held in the Russian city of Sochi on Wednesday. It remains unclear when and where their encounter will take place. The mediators hope that it will help to revive the Karabakh peace process.
“We must always differentiate between two planes,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharian. “One of them is about forming an atmosphere of trust, without which progress in the negotiation process is impossible, and the other about making progress in the negotiation process itself.”
“It is evident that right now there are no grounds, no positive trends that would allow us to speak of progress in the negotiation progress,” he told reporters.
Kocharian pointed to Baku’s reluctance to comply with confidence-building agreements that were reached by Aliyev and Sarkisian at their last meetings held more than a year ago. Those called for the deployment of more OSCE observers in the conflict zone and international investigations of truce violations occurring there. Armenian leaders have repeatedly said that the peace process cannot move forward without these confidence-building measures.
Speaking in Baku on Monday, Aliyev claimed that Yerevan has been forced to give up its “preconditions” for resuming substantive negotiations on a Karabakh settlement. Sarkisian angrily denied that claim through a spokesman the following day. His press secretary, Vladimir Hakobian, accused Aliyev of “trying to deceive the international community and his own people.”
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