The Co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group for the regulation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict hope that the next meeting of the Presidents of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Armenia Robert Kocharyan will take place in the nearest future, Trend reports. We hope that this meeting will take place on November 28, within the CIS Summit in Minsk, the Russian Co-chair of the Minsk Group Yuri Merzlyakov informed RIA Novosti.
On November 16, the co-chairs of the Minsk Group made speeches before the Permanent Council of the OSCE (France, USA and Russia).
According to the Russian Co-chair, the current year will present unique window of opportunities for achieving an agreement on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. He said that at the beginning of this year, both countries stated that earlier they were not as close to the agreement.
It would be a tragically successful chance for the Presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia to permit this window to close at the beginning of the next year to agree at least on the base principles for the future peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Merzlyakov said. In addition, he said that the next election cycle reaches in 2007-2008 first in Armenia and then in Azerbaijan. We already have the experience of the negative impacts of the elections on the negotiations, the Russian Co-chair said.
Answering the question about the possible impacts of the Kosovo regulation on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, he emphasized that all conflicts have own peculiarities. However, the regulation of the Kosovo question will somehow affect other conflicts in the OSCE territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh, Merzlyakov said.