Azernews.Az

Azerbaijani and Armenian intellectuals held a rare meeting in Moscow on Wednesday to discuss settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijan’s embassy in Russia said. Details of the talks were not immediately available.

The meeting aimed to promote establishment of humanitarian relations, in accord with the decision made during the trilateral meeting of the presidents of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia on January 23 in the Russian city of Sochi.

Russian President's special envoy for international cultural cooperation, Mikhail Shvydkoi, who initiated the meeting, said he could not specify the issues discussed, but the discussions were held in "a positive environment". Shvydkoi said the sides agreed to hold such meetings regularly and decided to conduct the next meeting in May. He did not cite a venue of the planned meeting, which will be the fourth of this kind.

Head of the Azerbaijan National Conservatory Siyavush Karimi, principal of the Uzeyir Hajibayli Baku Music Academy, People's Artist Farhad Badalbayli, rector of the Baku Slavic University, Prof. Kamal Abdulla, and director of the Muslim Magomayev State Philharmonic Hall Murad Adigozalzade were part of the Azerbaijani delegation that attended the meeting of intellectuals.

The Armenian side was represented by the rector of the State Theater and Cinematography Institute, Armen Mazmanyan, MP Germine Naghdalyan, Aravot newspaper’s editor-in-chief Aram Abramyan and director of the Rolan Bykov Foundation Nune Manukyan.

Azerbaijani and Armenian ambassadors to Russia, Polad Bulbuloglu and Oleg Yesayan, attended the meeting as well.

Bulbuloglu said participants of the meeting would put forward several initiatives to be submitted to the two countries’ governments.

"If these suggestions are accepted, we need to start materializing them," he said.

Azerbaijan and Armenia, its neighbor in the South Caucasus region, fought a brutal 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. Peace talks, brokered by US, Russian and French mediators through the OSCE Minsk Group, have been largely fruitless so far.

This story is published by AzerNEWS Weekly under a project funded by the Foundation for State Assistance to the Development of the Media under the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.