Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents may have a meeting in December on Karabakh settlement

YEREVAN, December 4. /ARKA/. Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev may have a meeting in December, the US co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group James Warlick wrote on his Twitter page.

Earlier media reports said that Sargsyan and Aliyev could meet in Paris on December 1 in another effort to resume talks on the peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict, but later reports said the date and the venue were changed.

According to Warlick, "We are on the way to the holding of the Armenian-Azerbaijani summit later this month." 

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict erupted into armed clashes after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s as the predominantly Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan sought to secede from Azerbaijan and declared its independence backed by a successful referendum. A truce was brokered by Russia in 1994, although no permanent peace agreement has been signed.

Since then, Nagorno-Karabakh and several adjacent regions have been under the control of Armenian forces of Karabakh. Nagorno-Karabakh is the longest-running post-Soviet era conflict and has continued to simmer despite the relative peace of the past two decades, with snipers causing tens of deaths a year. –0 –