Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that no parties to the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis want it to escalate further.
“Russia played a certain role in settling the very serious crisis [in Nagorno-Karabakh]. And nobody wants it to develop further, not Azerbaijan or Armenia or even more so residents of Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said on Wednesday during his annual Q&A session, known as the Direct Line.
“If we all live peacefully and amicably then we will create conditions to improve people’s lives, not just in the security sphere but also in current conditions. I mean normal existence of families, economic and social development, which people living in Karabakh urgently need. Because it is impossible to live always worrying about the resumption of an armed conflict, we understand it perfectly well. Leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan also realize that,” the president said.
Putin noted that the region had many problems. “There are issues linked to the restoration of normal infrastructure, demarcation of borders so that the relevant work could be carried out on the state border between Armenia and Azerbaijan especially in places that never had a state border and only had administrative lines between union republics,” the president explained.
He underlined that the process aiming to address these issues was already underway with a special trilateral group (Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia) established to achieve that. “We will do everything possible to restore normal relations in the region. Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh should definitely benefit from it. I want to believe that it will be like that despite all the difficulties that have been accumulating for decades,” the president stressed.
Renewed clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia erupted on September 27, 2020, with intense battles in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. On November 9, Putin, Aliyev and Pashinyan signed a joint statement on a complete ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh. According to the document, the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides remain at their positions, and a number of districts, including the Kalbajar District, come under the control of Baku. Russian peacekeepers were deployed along the engagement line and the Lachin corridor in Nagorno-Karabakh.
TASS
