YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 26, ARMENPRESS. A meeting of Armenian and Azerbaijan leaders shouldn’t be an end in itself, but it should have content, Armenian foreign ministry spokesperson Tigran Balayan said at a news conference today. At the same time he stressed that Armenia doesn’t put forward any preconditions for the meeting. Balayan emphasized that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has numerously stated his willingness to meet with the Azerbaijani President and negotiate on behalf of Armenia. “But this meeting must have content. And we expect this meeting to bring results also in terms of implementing the previous agreements. In the event of a content, agreements about the principals of the [conflict] settlement should be reached. We have a decades-old bitter experience how were reaching agreements and then Azerbaijan was refusing [the agreements]. Now, indeed, Pashinyan has stressed that all agreements that were reached should be implemented. This is about the agreements which were reached during the summits that took place after the [2016] April aggression,” Balayan said.

He specified that this particularly concerns the introduction of an investigative mechanism for incidents and the expansion of capacities and staff of the office of the OSCE Personal Representative of the Chairperson in Office. “We’ve had numerous occasions to say, and now unfortunately we must note that Azerbaijan is hampering the implementations of these agreements. Azerbaijan is hampering the implementation since 2016 to this day. During debates at the OSCE financial committee, which must make a decision on increasing the funding for the office of the OSCE Personal Representative of the Chairperson in Office, Azerbaijan is the only country to hamper this decision from being made. I am speaking about these agreements, and yes, we believe that it is necessary to create the kind of conditions which will create favorable conditions for advancing the peaceful settlement process of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict,” Balayan said.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan