ArmInfo.The agreement on the next meeting is a maximum of expectations from Nikol Pashinyan's upcoming meeting with Ilham Aliyev. ArmInfo expressed the opinion of the Director of the Caucasus Institute Alexander Iskandaryan.
According to ArmInfo's foreign diplomatic sources, the meeting of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will be held March 29 in Vienna with the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs. According to Pashinyan, the agenda of his meeting with the Azerbaijani President is the specification of principles for resolving the conflict and the issue of bringing Artsakh to the negotiating table."In my opinion, today we can discuss the restart of the idle negotiation process for quite a long time. A series of unofficial meetings between the Prime Minister of Armenia and the President of Azerbaijan is aimed at achieving precisely this goal. And, of course, the recent activities and statements of the OSCE Minsk Group in the aggregate, it leads to a restart of the negotiation process. It is imperative that the leaders of the conflicting countries meet periodically, "he stressedCommenting on the possible agenda of the upcoming talks, the political scientist expressed serious doubts about the possibility of the parties to the conflict and the co-chairs refusing the existing principles of settlement.
According to his estimates, the negotiations will continue on the basis of and around the Madrid principles. According to Iskandaryan, these principles can be varied, give different contexts and even meaning, however, it is impossible to remove them from the negotiating table today. "Yes, the Madrid principles are not in the interests and do not like either Yerevan, Baku or, especially Stepanakert. At the same time, they are more harmful for Azerbaijan than for the Armenian parties to the conflict. That is why in Yerevan the time for negotiation is voiced within the framework of these principles. Armenian politicians are mercilessly criticized for this, but, nevertheless, they at least have the opportunity to say this, unlike Azerbaijani politicians. Although the negotiations over the past few years have been within the framework and on the basis of the Madrid principles, "summarize Iskandaryan. Since 1992, the OSCE Minsk Group, represented by the co-chairs from Russia, the United States and France, has been involved in resolving the Karabakh conflict. At present, the settlement process is proceeding on the basis of the Madrid Principles put forward by the OSCE Minsk Group in 2007 and the Madrid Principles updated in 2009, among other things providing for territorial concessions from Artsakh and the deployment of a peacekeeping contingent in the conflict zone. We are talking about at least six districts of the republic.
Since the signing of the trilateral agreement on the establishment of a truce between the parties to the Karabakh conflict, almost a quarter of a century has passed. And all these years, surges of murders on the contact line have been interspersed with negotiations towards peace. However, since the end of last year, the killings have practically stopped, and the OSCE MG mediators, Baku and Yerevan, have started talking about the need to prepare the parties to the conflict for peace.