According the Kremlin, Putin and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev spoke on Tuesday “at the initiative of the Azerbaijani side.” The Russian leader phoned Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on Wednesday.
The Kremlin’s readouts of the calls said they presented to Putin details of their trilateral meeting in Brussels with European Council President Charles Michel. It was the second Armenian-Azerbaijani summit hosted by Michel in less than two months.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke with his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts the day after the May 22 summit. The Russian Foreign Ministry afterwards again criticized the European Union’s mediation efforts.
The ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, accused the EU of trying to “wedge” into the implementation of Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements brokered by Moscow earlier.
The agreements call for the demarcation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and the opening of transport links between the two South Caucasus states. Putin discussed their implementation with Aliyev and Pashinian.
An Armenian government statement said Putin welcomed the first session of an Armenian-Azerbaijani commission on the demarcation held on the border on May 24. It reaffirmed that the next session of the commission will be held in Moscow but gave no dates.
The statement said Putin and Pashinian agreed on the need to step up activities of a separate Russian-Armenian-Azerbaijani task force dealing with practical modalities of the transport links. It said they also discussed the possibility of kick-starting the work of the OSCE Minsk Group on Nagorno-Karabakh co-headed by the United States, Russia and France.
Moscow says that Washington and Paris stopped cooperating with it in the Minsk Group format after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. U.S. and French officials have not denied that.