Azernews.Az

BAKU – Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has welcomed Thursday’s statement on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict issued by the US, French and Russian leaders, saying the three countries brokering peace talks for the first time urged to change the status quo in the long-standing conflict.

"We have not heard such precise and serious statement before," President Aliyev told an event in Baku marking May 28, Day of Republic. "In other words, a change in the status quo means that the occupying [Armenian] forces must be pulled out of the occupied territories and Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity restored."

Aliyev reiterated that the Karabakh conflict is to be resolved strictly within Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity.

"Our territorial integrity must be fully reinstated. We hope that the negotiations will yield fruit."

In their statement, issued at the G8 summit in the French resort of Deauville, Presidents Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Dmitry Medvedev said the use of force led to the current situation of confrontation and instability, "firmly calling" on the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia "to prepare their people for peace, not war". They urged the two presidents to demonstrate political will and finalize the basic principles of a peace agreement during the forthcoming summit in June.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a six-year war over Nagorno Karabakh that emerged before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and ended with the signing of a fragile ceasefire in 1994. 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory has been under Armenian occupation since the war. Mediators from Russia, the United States and France have led negotiations on Karabakh settlement but little progress has been made so far.