Baku, Azerbaijan, July 20

By Elmira Tariverdiyeva – Trend:

The place of the meeting of Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents, Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan, has not been yet determined, Artem Kozhin, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Information and Press Department, told a briefing on July 20.

The information, earlier published in the "Izvestia" newspaper with reference to a source in Russia's Foreign Ministry saying that the next meeting of the two presidents would be held in Moscow, does not correspond to reality, he said.

“We noticed the article in "Izvestia" and we would like to point to factual inaccuracies in the publication,” Kozhin noted.

During the consultations of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, it was offered to organize a meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents by late 2017, he said, adding that the meeting place was not discussed in detail.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.