At a meeting with his Armenian counterpart in Moscow, Lavrov said the Kremlin was ready to assist in the normalisation of Armenia-Azerbaijan relations.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday welcomed his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan for bilateral talks that covered the latest developments in Armenia-Azerbaijan tensions.
At the meeting in Moscow, Lavrov said the Kremlin was ready to assist in the normalisation of Armenia-Azerbaijan relations, while Armenia’s foreign minister said he hoped that Russia would take into account all aspects of recent events, “avoiding one-sided interpretations, which we have unfortunately seen recently.”.
“I hope that our meeting today promotes mutual understanding,” Mirzoyan added.
The meeting comes amid decades-long fraught relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s repeated announcement of his intention to leave the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), an intergovernmental military alliance led by Russia, similar to NATO.
Pashinaian has also said he wanted to shift to developing closer ties with the US and the European Union after accusing Moscow of taking sides with Azerbaijan in Yerevan’s conflict with Baku.
“We are ready to provide the necessary assistance to the normalisation of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan on all tracks in the development of the trilateral agreements reached by the leaders of the three countries in 2020 and 2022,” Lavrov said at the media briefing.
“We believe that these agreements are still relevant, especially in light of the current situation in the region. So we have a very busy agenda.” he added.
Armenia-Azerbaijan relations have been tense for more than 30 years since war broke out over Nagorno-Karabakh in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The conflict is the longest between two post-Soviet nations.
In 2020, after three decades of failed diplomatic efforts, Azerbaijan launched a military operation it described as “anti-terror”, which claimed some parts of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
The six-week war, known as the Second Karabakh War ended with a Moscow-brokered ceasefire with Russian troops deployed to guarantee the agreement.
However, three years later, Baku gained full control of Nagorno-Karabakh when more than 100,000 Armenians fled as Baku forces advanced.
Armenian authorities accuse Moscow’s peacekeepers, who were deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh after the 2020 war, of failing to stop the Azerbaijani onslaught, an accusation that the Kremlin has denied.
Russia instead accused the Armenian government of being pro-Western. The accusations over the Second Karabakh War have strained relations between Armenia and Russia, who have been long-time allies.
Additional sources • EBU
