US hopes meeting of Azerbaijani, Armenian presidents to be successful
Robert Cekuta, U.S. Ambassador to Baku has voiced hope that the meeting of the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia to mull ways to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will be successful.
Cekuta, while talking to journalists on December 6, said the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs are working hard to push the process around the Nagorno-Karabakh forward. The presidents are expected to meet by late December 2015.
The latest meeting between President Ilham Aliyev and President Serzh Sargsyan took place in France last October.
The Paris talks were expected to bring some breakthrough in the stalled conflict, but Armenia’s provocative actions and intensive ceasefire violations have aggravated the situation even more.
For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict that emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, the Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions.
A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 1994, but long-standing efforts by U.S., Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far.
Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from the neighboring country's territories.
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