Azernews.Az

US, Russian and French mediators brokering settlement to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict on Tuesday attended a regular OSCE monitoring on the contact line of Azerbaijani and Armenian troops.

According to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry, no incidents occurred during the monitoring, conducted on a road that links villages in Armenia and Azerbaijan’s Gazakh region, and the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs crossed to the Azerbaijani side of the Line of Contact.

While in Gazakh, the co-chairs met with the head of the region’s executive authority Ayaz Asgarov.

"This time, we made the crossing not on the Line of Contact in Karabakh, but on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border," French Minsk Group co-chair Bernard Fassier told the press after the meeting. "Fortunately, there is less tension here."

Afterwards, the mediators left for the Azerbaijani capital Baku on a helicopter.

The co-chairs began a visit to the region on Monday from the Armenian capital Yerevan, where they held talks with top officials. During their meeting with Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, discussions focused on the current stage in the Nagorno Karabakh settlement process ahead of the December meeting of the OSCE foreign ministers in Vilnius, the Armenian president’s press service said in a statement.

The parties stressed the importance of strengthening confidence between Azerbaijan and Armenia, it said.

Besides Bernard Fassier of France, Robert Bradtke of the United States and Igor Popov of Russia, as well as OSCE chairperson’s personal envoy Andrzej Kasprzyk, the meeting was attended by Jacques Faure, the outgoing French ambassador to Ukraine who will succeed Fassier from 2012.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a lengthy war in the early 1990s. 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. Numerous rounds of Minsk Group-brokered negotiations have been fruitless so far.