YEREVAN, January 8. /ARKA/. The official Yerevan has received a proposal of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs suggesting that Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and Elmar Mammadyarov have another meeting, a press secretary for the Armenian Foreign Ministry Anna Naghdalyan said.
Mnatsakanyan and Mammadyarov had their latest, third meeting in early December 2018 in Italy’s Milan to have a deeper look into the positions and approaches of the parties concerning the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
"The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs submitted a proposal to hold a meeting of foreign ministers in January," Naghdalyan said.
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.
On May 12, 1994, the Bishkek cease-fire agreement put an end to the military operations. 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.
On April 2, 2016, Azerbaijan launched military assaults along the entire perimeter of its contact line with Nagorno-Karabakh. Four days later a cease-fire was reached. -0-