Azerbaijan Not Avoiding Meetings With Armenia At Any Level - President

Azerbaijan is not trying to avoid meetings with Armenian officials at any level and is interested in the swift resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, President Ilham Aliyev told Sputnik on the sidelines of WEF in Davos

DAVOS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 22nd January, 2019) Azerbaijan is not trying to avoid meetings with Armenian officials at any level and is interested in the swift resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, President Ilham Aliyev told Sputnik on the sidelines of WEF in Davos.

"We had two conversations [with Armenia] in Dushanbe during the [Commonwealth of Independent States] CIS countries' summit, and in St. Petersburg during the informal CIS summit. It can't be called full-fledged meetings, but those were useful discussions in order to formulate positions and give an impetus to the negotiations process, which has now activated ... Certainly, Azerbaijan has never been avoiding contacts at any level with the Armenian side, because we are interested in the soonest possible settlement of the conflict," Aliyev said, when asked if meetings with the Armenian government were planned.

The president added that the two countries' foreign ministers had recently met in Paris, and "statements from the both sides were positive."

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov told Sputnik last week that he had agreed with acting Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan to hold the next meeting on the conflict in February.

The two countries are engaged in a dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region with a predominantly Armenian population, which proclaimed its independence in 1991, triggering a military conflict that has not fully ended yet. In early April 2016, tensions between Azerbaijani and Nagorno-Karabakh forces escalated, resulting in multiple casualties. Sporadic clashes continue even though the sides promptly agreed to cease hostilities.