Interfax, Russia
Oct 14 2009

Diplomat: Armenia-Turkey relations should not be linked to N.-Karabakh issue

BAKU Oct 14

A senior Russian diplomat argued that it is the wrong policy to make
any warming-up between Armenia and Turkey conditional on progress
toward the settlement of the two-decade Armenian-Azeri conflict over
Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed Armenian- speaking enclave in Azerbaijan.

"We believe that the opening of the Armenian-Turkish border shouldn’t
be allowed to slow down the process of settlement of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict," Russian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Vladimir
Dorokhin told Interfax.

"When we say there is no interconnection between those two processes,
we have in mind that the process of rapprochement between Turkey and
Armenia should not be allowed to hamper the process of resolution of
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict," he said.

The Armenian and Azeri presidents, Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev,
had their latest meeting on Nagorno-Karabakh on the fringes of a
Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Chisinau, capital of
Moldova, last week.