The regular meetings of the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents aim to reanimate the Karabakh peace process under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group, according to Director of the Caucasus Institute Alexander Iskandaryan.
He said that two meetings have already taken place and now negotiations are being held to organize the third meeting. It will be harder to hold that meeting because in fact the parties have nothing to speak about and the two countries' societies are already displaying discontent with those meetings.
"Sooner or later, the meeting will be organized and the process will go on, because all parties, including the US and Russia are interested in it. However, this does not mean that Baku will be reluctant to resort to another provocation the way it did in spring 2016," he said.
When asked whether the Russian-Turkish relations will affect the Karabakh peace process and the relations with Armenia, Iskandaryan noted that the Russian-Turkish normalization would happen sooner or later, because both Moscow and Ankara benefit from it. The expert recalled that Russia is the second economic partner for Turkey and Ankara is the seventh for Moscow.
"The parties sought to find the ways out of the current situation and to save their face. The Moscow-Ankara relations are normalizing but they won't be the same, because the downing of the Russian plane left a nasty taste," he said. Iskandaryan does not think that the normalization of the Russian-Turkish relations will affect the Armenian-Russian relations or have some effect on the Armenian-Turkish relations.