U.S. State Department hails upcoming Azerbaijan-Armenia meeting
By Sara Rajabova
The U.S. State Department hailed the upcoming meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents.
Azerbaijani and Armenian Presidents have it in their power to launch comprehensive settlement talks, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland said in her speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington on November 14.
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan agreed to meet in late November to discuss the settlement of the long-lasting conflict.
Nuland called the upcoming meeting of the two countries' presidents a positive development.
Nuland said that the U.S. would continue to cooperate with Russia on solving the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
"Russia has long been a partner of the United States on a number of issues where we can work together. I think our overall approach remains to try to cooperate with Russia as much as we can on as many issues as we can that we share, whether they`re bilateral issues, whether they`re regional issues like Nagorno-Karabakh, or whether they`re global issues like Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, et cetera," Nuland said.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict emerged in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Since a lengthy war in the early 1990s that displaced over one million Azerbaijanis, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.
The UN Security Council's four resolutions on Armenian withdrawal have not been enforced to this day.
Peace talks, mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. through the OSCE Minsk Group, are underway on the basis of a peace outline proposed by the Minsk Group co-chairs and dubbed the Madrid Principles. The negotiations have been largely fruitless so far.