Azernews.Az

BAKU – Kazakhstan’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan Serik Primbetov has termed the joint statement adopted at the OSCE summit in Astana in early December by Azerbaijan and Armenia and the countries brokering settlement to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict as progress in the peace process.

The statement, issued by Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan jointly with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said "the time has come for more decisive efforts" to resolve the Karabakh conflict.

Primbetov told a news conference in Baku on Wednesday that during its chairmanship in the OSCE this year, Kazakhstan has worked to move Karabakh settlement forward and has achieved some success.

"They expect a breakthrough from [the settlement of] such conflicts, but this cannot be done in a year’s time," the ambassador said.

Azerbaijan waged a war with Armenia in the early 1990s, which claimed some 30,000 lives and displaced about a million Azerbaijanis. Armenian armed forces have been occupying over 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory since then, and OSCE-brokered peace talks have been largely fruitless so far.