Azernews.Az

Azerbaijan hopes that Russia will "adjust" its activity aiming to settle the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and step up effort to facilitate a solution of the long-standing dispute, Deputy Foreign Minister Araz Azimov has said.

Azimov said in an interview with Ukraine’s Den newspaper that the ongoing peace talks with Armenia, brokered by the OSCE Minsk Group, lately with close involvement of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, have been fruitless.

Azimov stressed with regret that the Azerbaijani, Armenian and Russian presidents' Kazan meeting in late June yielded no fruit, and afterwards there was "a sense of a pause" in the peace process. However, he added, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Russian counterpart further held talks in Sochi in August, and "we hope that following this meeting Russia will adjust its actions" and will try to intensify the peace process jointly with the two other co-chairs of the Minsk Group - U.S. and France.

"Unfortunately, we are hearing more and more statements of an offensive nature from the Armenian president, which seem to be speculative," Azimov said. "I am referring to his recent statement in New York about the need to recognize ‘independence’ of the Nagorno Karabakh region. We also face Armenia's intensified efforts to procure offensive weapons."

The deputy minister said it appears that Armenia is deliberately trying to "provoke a crisis", relying on Russian peacekeepers, just as was the case in August 2008 in Georgia.

"It is easy to predict that the unfolding of such a crisis could lead to extremely negative consequences," Azimov said.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a lengthy war in the early 1990s that displaced up to a million Azerbaijanis. About 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory, including the Nagorno Karabakh region, has been under the occupation of Armenian armed forces since a fragile ceasefire was signed in 1994. Peace talks, brokered by the Minsk Group, have brought few tangible results.

Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno Karabakh, backed by Armenia, declared so-called independence in 1991, which has not been recognized by the international community.