Azernews.Az

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on Wednesday hosted the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs brokering settlement to the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh to discuss prospects for a negotiated solution of the long-standing dispute, the president's press service said.

The meeting was attended by Robert Bradtke of the United States, Igor Popov of Russia, the outgoing French co-chair Bernard Fassier and his successor Jacques Faure, as well as OSCE chairperson’s personal envoy Andrzej Kasprzyk.

On the same day, the mediators held a meeting with Azerbaijani Defense Minister Safar Abiyev during which they shared their views on the situation on the contact line of Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The co-chairs first held talks with top officials in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Monday. On Tuesday, they observed an OSCE frontline monitoring in Azerbaijan’s Gazakh region, which borders on Armenia, and further crossed to the Azerbaijani side of the Line of Contact.

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.