ArmInfo. Today I do not see any prerequisites for particularly serious changes in the situation around the Artsakh settlement. The director of the Armenian Institute for International and Security Affairs, the head of the Public Council of Armenia Stepan Safaryan expressed a similar opinion to ArmInfo.
"Serious changes in the negotiations will become possible only in case of a complete change of power in Azerbaijan following the example of Armenia. In case forces as democratic as the Prime Minister of Armenia and his entourage come to power in the neighboring country. I am convinced that as long as Ilham Aliyev is in power, he will always have a problem to save his own face>, he stressed.
The basis for Safaryan's such confidence is Aliyev's repeated promises to his own people to return all territories without exception by negotiation or military means. In this light, there is no sense to experience any expectations from the negotiations, according to the analyst. First of all, given the refusal of Armenia to consider such an agenda back in 1998. At a meeting with internally displaced persons at the end of May, Aliyev expressed absolute confidence in the restoration of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity through "already demonstrated military power". "Today, Azerbaijan has created such a powerful army that we can carry out any task. Let no one have doubts. We just need to be stronger, correctly assess the time and geopolitical situation to resolve issues," he assured the settlers.
Noting Aliyev's regular attempts to resort to the threat of using force to resolve the conflict, Safaryan suggested that the President of Azerbaijan realize quite well that he personally drove the negotiations into a dead end and unleashed the April war. In this light, another similar attempt, according to the analyst's forecasts, will become fatal both for Azerbaijan itself and for the region as a whole. Since 1992, the OSCE Minsk Group, represented by the co-chairs from Russia, the USA and France, has been engaged in the settlement of the Karabakh conflict. Currently, the settlement process is nominally proceeding on the basis of the "Madrid principles" put forward by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs in 2007 in Madrid and updated in 2009, which, among other things, envisage the deployment of a peacekeeping contingent in the conflict zone.