Forecast: Serious shifts in negotiations are possible only if Aliyevs  leave

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.